Topics: Travel, Flight attendant, Plane Etiquette, Podcasts
Whether it’s being stuck next to a rowdy stag group or the person in front of you slamming their chair in recline as soon as the plane takes off, we’ve all got our own travel horror stories.
But it turns out the cabin crew often get just as irked by the same things as the rest of us... they're probably just better at hiding it than we are.
Former flight attendant Shawn Kathleen – aka ‘SK - now runs Instagram account @passengershaming, having previously blogged about her occupational frustrations on Rants of a Sassy Stew.
In a new interview with Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan on the I’ve Had It podcast, SK talked us through all the things that have wound her up over the years while in the sky.
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“One thing I’ve absolutely had it with [...] the sense of entitlement of passengers, I’ve absolutely had it with them,” she started.
“And that goes from the boarding process – you know, the guy who stops in the middle of the aisle while 100 people are behind them and they’re getting out all their s**t? You know, that guy – to treating the airplane like it’s your living room.
“Let’s stop with putting feet everywhere and body parts on s**t that we don’t own.
“It just encompasses everything, it’s the sense of entitlement. It’s like, ‘Hey, I paid a few hundred dollars for tickets so I can treat you like s**t, I can treat the crew like s**t, I can treat my fellow passengers like s**t, and the airplane - that’s $85 million – like s**t.
“So I’ve absolutely f**king had it with that.”
But there’s one of those things that SK finds particularly bad, as it’s not just rude, but also downright gross.
“It’s so disgusting,” she said when asked about people who take their shoes and socks off on board.
“And I think that needs to be a mandate: socks, you have to f**king wear socks.”
SK said she’s ‘not a fan’ of removing just shoes, but feels there is an appropriate way to do it if you have to.
"This becomes a whole thing, right?” she went on.
“Because everyone’s like ‘Oh I can’t take my shoes off’. Well, okay, you can under certain circumstances.
“You could be in first class and a lot of business class, they give you slippers or socks with the intention of removing your shoes. So if you have clean socks, you don’t smell, you don’t take your foot and put it up next to my head, or you keep in your little space and do that, I’m okay with it.
“But nobody wants to be seeing your nasty bare feet.”
She added: “And that goes for flip flops, I’m sorry.. And, by the way, that is a safety issue.
“God forbid you have to get out quickly, they’ll prevent egress [safe exit from the plane] - rapid egress. You’ve got your flip flops flying all over the place... No. That’s an absolute not.”
