Airport ’19 (Part 1).

Some time ago I wrote about my time working at the airport, but it was so extense that I thought about splitting it into more stories so it would last longer. Airport ’18 was the one about the year I started there. This will be telling the story of how I got fed up with passengers and why I don’t mind not going back there anymore.

Lately I have not much spare time, work takes most of it, so I spend the last couple of days wondering about what topic to write about. Then I remembered about the post I said before and about how many stories I haven’t told. As I am writing this I can’t help but wonder, were all those stories so weird just in my head or were they actually that odd? What is wrong with people when they go to the airport?

My friend Johnnie is working again at the airport and from what he has been telling me things haven’t changed much. As soon as you are dealing with passengers you need to have a really cool mind and remember to breathe so you won’t blow up.

I had been almost a year working for the wheelchair service at the airport, but the politics there stated that you can only have a one year contract. After that you have to find another place to work,and if you are lucky they may call you back. All this so they don’t have to hire you indefinitely. So basically the pool of staff at the airport is made of people floating from one job to the other in order to be always working and in a kind of circular movement between jobs. My idea was working for handling for another year and maybe coming back to the wheelchairs after that. Unless I was lucky and found something more steady before that.

I had the opportunity to start for a handling service where my skills should be welcomed. Speaking 3 languages and having some experience as a passenger should be a good thing. Besides it was supposed to be a great place to work, from what we were told, and from what we saw while being taught before starting. Little did we know it was just a curtain of smoke.

We came from a place where one thing was what we learned in theory and another very different was what we got in reality. Most of the time it was OK, but many others we had to deal with situations that went against what we were supposed to do. For instance we were told never to push two wheelchairs at the same time or with the bagage trolley, someone should have told us we were going to have to deal with 3 passengers at the same time and if we didn’t they would be losing their flights, so we had to improvise.

In the new one everything was under supervision by superiors. We would never be alone and we had every possible situation on paper to deal with it. All was supposed to be like clockwork. This was very far from the truth. It didn’t take us long to figure this out. First was my friend who got me the job. She was called a month after she started to the office to sign her contract. As she did she got fired, they needed her to be employed to get rid of her. They did the same to other two colleagues who went there happy to be hired formally just to find out they got dismissed. Suddenly we all got scared to be called to fill the forms. In the end those 3 ex colleagues were the lucky ones.

We learned very fast that we were left alone most of the time to deal with the mess others made and had to figure out solutions by ourselves because no one would be helping. Basically because instead of being two at boardings we would go there alone. No need to hire more people if the ones you already have can do the job for free. This was something that became too often the situation.

Checking some airlines was supposed to be in 3/4 desks, it was not always like that due to shortage of staff. So the ones we were there we had to deal with that. The worse was when the chief of staff was in the terminal. We never knew in what mood she would be. She could be the friendliest person ever and then telling you to f off five minutes later. One day I had an early start and I couldn’t open the desk yet since it would have a penalty if I did before time. So I went back to the office to get all the memos signed. She saw me there and she shouted at me «what do fuck are you doing here instead of being checking passengers?» I told her I couldn’t until quarter to. She then stormed away. Ten minutes after I started checking passengers she came by and asked me «is everything OK here darling?»… It was scary to work around her. Fortunately I had shifts were she wasn’t on duty.

Then it was the rush with everything due, of course, to the fact we were always under staff. So the ones that remained had to do the job of two people. Boarding flights of 189 passengers on your own was something very normal. Most of the time this would be fine, but sometimes you had issues. In the end one of my colleagues was told about some mistakes she made on a boarding so she decided not to rush anymore, she said to the supervisors she would take as long as she needed to do it so if flight is delayed not to complain and out more people with her.

The complaints about the system they used were constant, whether it was because of rushing us to work or by the fact some of the rules we learned during our formation were never applied, so we forgot them and when some mystery shoppers or executives from the airlines were there we had to remember them or suffer insults from the chief of staff because she got stressed.

Most of the times it had to do with labels on the hand luggage and weighting them at the gate or charging passengers for the excess there. Which is something we had to do and we wanted to do but couldn’t basically for a lack of people working together. With the British airline we worked it happened a lot. I think I boarded twice with another colleague and then it was always on my own, so getting the flight ready for boarding, with all the stickers and galibos and stuff alone was annoying. Not to say that once they started boarding I couldn’t waste time in all of that. So in the end I had to put labels in all their hand baggage whether they were OK or not. We didn’t have time to do otherwise unless we got help. That would happen in more conflicting flights, there we would be two or three people.

The tension between us and superiors was very palpable. Aside from the stress you get when you are checking in or boarding passengers, to make sure you do it correctly, there was the additional one you got from bad answers and feeling no backup from the supervisors. One of them was always so tired from doing two jobs we had to constantly remind him when to close flights and when to send us to the gate. This was an every day job for us so we would make sure we were on time every where and we didn’t get told out for it.

The chief of staff was most of the time doing something at the terminal and would be able to be nice and obnoxious in the same ten minutes time, so you would never know how to speak to her. As I told before it was very common to have her asking you what the f you were doing and then the moment later she being absolutely adorable. We all had to endure this kind of bipolar behaviour. It was like a bet of how bad she would be. She always was. She made no mistakes while working but I think it was more due to the fact she had been doing it for ages than because she was gifted. One day on a checking, I had issues with a couple of passengers that had special needs and it had to be done carefully, she kicked me out of the chair to fix it. They looked at me with surprise and a bit of pain. When she fixed it, and it took her more than ten minutes she left all upset and told me to sit down and try to do better, the passengers apologised for that, which was not their fault but they knew it had been rough from her on me.

Most of the times passengers were fine, but we got to a point we knew every day we would have that couple that would make a fuss about everything and would be annoying no matter what. That is for Part 2. Dealing with passengers in that kind of environment was too much to handle and I gave up after 3 months. It felt like ages to me but I just couldn’t get myself to do it anymore.

May 2022