September 28, 2019 - 15 - "More Susan Slander"

     If you haven't read my feelings concerning the term 'Lazy Susan' you won't have a full appreciation of how little I'm enjoying the latest aspersions cast on Susans.  ("Useful Susan's" Post)

      I'm a flight attendant working for a large carrier.  We barely hired new people between about 1995 and 2014.  The few we did hire were laid off after September 11.

     So there's a big divide between old-hires and new-hires.

     I'm nothing but thrilled with each and every beautiful newly-minted flight attendant; mainly because seniority is everything in the airline biz.  Trips, vacation, reserve (on-call-months-from-hell) status, when you can take vacation and for how long...is all determined by your seniority.

     Apparently, they aren't as happy with the senior flight attendants as I am with them.  This is completely understandable.  Being junior bites.  We had our own terms when I was new:  'Dinosaurs' was a favorite.  They closed the San Diego base years ago.  You could only be based there if you'd been flying since Lindbergh was around.  Suddenly these ladies (and, yeah, they were almost all women then,) needed to find new bases to fly from.  The news went out like this:  "Beware:  The Dinosaurs are roaming!"

     Now the (orthopedic?) shoe is definitely on the other foot.  Just recently I heard there was a vote on one of the new-hire Facebook pages.  They were trying to choose a name to use to refer to senior flight attendants.

     The vote came down to two names:  Betty or Susan.  Guess which they chose?                                   
    Yep.  Now the new hires will, apparently, be telling each other things like this:  "Ugh.  Gotta fly with 'The Susans' on this trip."

     I suppose babies aren't being named Susan anymore so it sounds like an old-lady name to them?  I admit there is a weirdly high percentage of flight attendants named Susan.  Much higher than the percentage of Susans in the country overall.                                                         

     What's extra-disturbing is this choice was made a couple of years ago and I never heard about it.  (Old people are soooooo out of the loop.)

     What's really ironic is that I, a person who happens to be named Susan,  stayed at the bottom of the barrel forever.  The first 25 years of my career were all about juniority.   It's extra-aggravating, that my very name is meant to imply I have some benefit that new-hires do not.   * s i g h *

     I had lunch with a flight attendant friend (old, like me) and complained about this development.  She said she thought she'd heard something about that.  She tried to reassure me:  It's not personal, they just picked a random name."

     Easy for her to say.  It's not her name.

     I asked how she'd feel if someone said:  "Oh Lord, The Shari on my trip is such a pain!"

    "Oh.", she said, "That does feel different."

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"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you."-Nora Ephron