"Traveling With The 99%": A Handy Guide To Onboard Drinking

Tip #2: Make Nice With The Flight Attendant

In terms of no-brainer advice, this should stand out in blazing neon letters, and yet, in my travel experience, there are still people who somehow need to be told this. Look, I get it: air travel is an exhausting, dehumanizing cattle call that takes your patience and dignity and grinds it down to a tiny nub. This, of course, is why we offer a travel drinking guide in the first place. And it's not difficult to understand why, having choked down one stale pretzel too many, people tend to lash out at the only accessible representatives of the airline, namely, the flight attendants. But there's both a moral and a practical reason why this is the wrong response. Morally speaking, of course, it is as wrong for you to blame the flight attendant for your shitty flight experience as it might be to blame the usher at the ArcLight for Jack & Jill. In case you haven't noticed, airlines are skimping all over, which means that your flight attendant is just as upset about the completely unfabulous Rayon sweater-vest that AirTran is making him wear as you are about paying $7.50 for an ice-cold turkey wrap. And when the plane finally touches down in Ft. Lauderdale and you're stumbling towards baggage claim, muttering under your breath about how you couldn't have spent 10 more minutes on that claustrophobic death-tube, guess what? He's got to go clean out 150 used-gum wrappers from seat pockets, re-board the whole plane, and jet back to Sacramento. So maybe be a human being and have a little empathy. Besides, there's a fairly obvious practical gain to all of this, too, which is that the flight attendants control and disburse the liquor. Not only will treating them rudely result in possibly getting cut off from the good stuff, but treating them nicely can often produce some wonderful benefits. For example, my brother and I were boarding a Boston-to-Milwaukee flight last week when the flight attendant, speaking to nobody in particular, issued a challenge to the line of passengers to sing the lyrics to "Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting." Since we were already a few beers deep, we belted it out. 20 minutes later, once the plane was in the air, he came by and surreptitiously slipped us a few free mini-bottles of Jack Daniels. [photo via]