The problem of falling in love, with jet lag:

That moment of waking-up like at three in the morning in a Hotel room it´s not an elegant sight to see: semi fat semi nude semi all wet and smelling like a college dorm, it´s not glamorous. That is why I  always wanted to change the video presentation of recruitment and add a small scene of the real life of a random crew during a layover, to give you an example it would be a combination of Dory (P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way) and Karen Smith (there is a 30 % chance that it´s already raining!).

It´s not only the fact that we seriously (or at least 80 % of crew) have no idea where we are standing half of the times but it´s also the fact that we loose all sense of direction.  We wake up in one city, go to sleep in another one, have a stopover to return home and a phew days later we are sleeping in another Continent and you may think: “but it´s a glorious opportunity to get to know the world”. You get to know it, yeah but you get to know more Airports than the cities itself and that´s part of the contract. That is why I´m not even in my 30´s and I´m already having hot flashes, cold flashes, disorientation, my menstrual period coming on and off whenever it wants and I think that I´m starting to develop something a little bit worrying, sleepwalking. Being totally honest, not very long time ago I woke up in the middle of the hallway of the Hotel in which we were staying at in Kuala Lumpur, don´t ask me what happened in between because I seriously don´t remember. The weirdest thing is that at first I didn´t know if I should talk about this being afraid of getting sacked or sent to the clinic but apparently everyone or at least a lot of crew developed serious health issues due to jet-lag.

Ironically speaking during training we were told about this and all of our trainers gave us personal experiences on how they dealt with their sleep privation, but now that I´m having a nip I would seriously say to that very special coach that doing yoga and going for a spin it´s in the same level as saying to a handicapped go for a jog. 

Nevertheless, not very long time ago I developed my “how fucked-up-am-I scale” that it simply consists in how much powder and base must I apply to pretend that I´m a functional human being. The pick level is when I apply 3 different foundations and 2 different types of gloss and mascara, more or less the same amount of make-up that a drag queen use´s when going to a Mardi Gras. But behind all of that there is a person that has no idea what is happening around, that's one of the many reasons that it´s becoming more than current to totally blank out during service and forget how the galley is stocked and even sometimes where security equipment is. Did you know that our paid working hours start from the moment we close doors until we re-open them? When we are in a layover and even during briefing coins don´t come into my little pink ceramic piggy, thus “no” money it´s not the real goal in this relation.

At the end it´s just like a bad sex scene without the orgasm: waking up all sweaty with small shivers in the middle of “I-don´t-know-where-I-am” with my heart pounding at a million miles per hour, that is why so many times we may pretended that we are happy in our “big oh!” when we weren’t even close to having the slightest sense of satisfaction. 

(I don´t own the above picture)