Can work change your personality?
Coffee, tea or me?
It was during one of those countless early mornings, too early to remember the destination or city of origin. I stood at the beverage cart in auto mode, asking the two people closest to the window if they wanted anything to drink or any snacks, and after handing them their coffee or cola and pretzels is when the woman sitting at the aisle lifted her eye mask.
I should’ve known better when she squinted her eyes open. In the split-second afterwards I asked her if she wanted anything in my perky, programmed-for-service voice, probably smiling like a maniac. Beverage service waits for no one, not when there’s dozens more people left to “refresh.”
“Jesus Christ," she mumbled under her breath, scowling at me. Then she pulled her eye mask back down.
I laughed out loud, looking around to see if anyone else witnessed the interaction. The most unlikely of interactions. I had turned into my worst morning nightmare and someone had called me on it. I accosted her in a vulnerable state and did something that if the tables were turned would given me reason to grump around for hours. What had I done? And more importantly, who had I become?
When we work in roles outside of our comfort zone or against our internal body clock, three obvious choices present themselves: quit the job, be miserable, or adjust. If we choose the latter, then a concerted effort must be made.
To channel Carrie Bradshaw while I look wistfully out the window: do we change in our jobs or do our jobs change us?
When I started to research this chicken-or-egg topic, I typed “why are Americans so obsessed with…” and the phrase “why are Americans so obsessed with protein” populated. Not what I wanted to look into, but a valid question nonetheless.
Popular culture and the media highlight the expected disposition and appearances of flight attendants much more than what our work actually entails. If the public does think of us at all, there’s a strong association with how we should be, in other words the quintessential flight attendant. Always in view, happily attending the planes, required to show up in an unsaid but very particular way: perky, attractive and amenable.
There’s the customer service component that comes to mind for most people. We’re there for your comfort, the thinking goes. Then there’s the safety component which I’ve written enough about here, not as apparent to the general public.
One flight attendant I worked with summed up our in-person interview to get the job as “an audition.” Just like an audition, we needed to highlight our strengths and showcase our personality, a tricky thing for researches and psychologist to pin down. The writer and journalist Olga Khazan writes about personality change on Substack and recently published a memoir titled, “Me, But Better.”
“I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either,” she starts out in an Atlantic article that got so many hits she wrote an entire book on the same subject.
In it she explores the principle called the Big Five personality traits. These involve personality differences researchers and scientists can test for and analyze. We contain multitudes, and yet need to be put into boxes to define human behavior. These traits can affect physical health and success in relationships and jobs, which can contribute or retract from overall happiness.
These traits include: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
When I started researching the topic, I found one of the definitions to be surprising. Conscientiousness doesn’t so much involve awareness as being “hardworking, dedicated and organized,” according to the research database EBSCO.
Extroversion is straightforward and so is openness to experience. When it comes to flight attendants, there’s no doubt that we all possess an off-the-charts ability to take a “daring and imaginative approach to life and being interested in many topics and activities,” as defined by EBSCO.
Based on my own assessment, I score high in neuroticism like Khazan and in the past scored lower on extroversion. From all the time I’ve spent in jumpseat therapy, I’ve gathered that many other honest flight attendants would also rank themselves as anxious, depressed and somewhat introverted. Welcome aboard!
I believe you can do the job well as a neurotic person, but you must be at least somewhat agreeable, or “warm and empathetic,” according to Khazan’s definition. And most people I work with indeed give you that fuzzy, comfortable feeling.
However, there are many antagonistic flight attendants out there. I’m only saying this to point out that the value of inauthenticity can allow you to appear agreeable in a job interview when you’re actually the opposite.
I try to be entertained by the mean ones, the senior mamas and papas who bully junior flight attendants. (I worked with a particularly nasty one in Seattle, and my other crew member said in order to cope she just pictures her grandmother trying to mean mug her). While I don’t let pilots push me around because there’s a power dynamic that I attempt to dismantle every day, we’re supposed to be on an even playing field with other flight attendants. I don’t really care if they’re mean to me. I can mostly take it.
It’s interesting how for a role that requires being surrounded by hundreds of people in a day, you either like people more or put up with them less. Or just cope in whatever weird way the brain can manage.
During one recent delirious trip I worked with a guy named Evan. After a challenging couple of flights, we joked that we just wanted to spend the entirety of service facing the corner of the galley, divorcing ourselves from reality. In other words, disassociating.
You’ll hear that word thrown around a lot in the aft galley- disassociating.
“If I disassociate enough service will fly by,” a dry- humored crew member and unicorn of a flight attendant (straight and male) once told me.
Reality begins to slip after so many legs. Evan and I laughed about how many times we had to ask the simple phrase, “coffee, tea or water?” and then repeat it again to the next person, exerting ourselves over their seat, leaning in and toeing the line between shouting and enunciating so as to not wake the sleeping passengers. Our programming glitched out from repeating ourselves so many times in a row while people ignored us for their much more interesting screens.
Evan held his wrist out like Sylvie from the show Emily in Paris, moving them side to side, a wild look in his eyes. “Coffee, tea or me? Coffee, tea or me?” he chanted in the galley after the arduous service. Tears streamed down my face, and I had to compose myself when a call light rang.
Later in the flight he told me he doesn’t even care if passengers hurl their misdirected rage at him. He just disassociates and says, “I’m so sorry. How can I make it better?” with a huge smile on his face, head titled.
This all makes me think of the time I was strolling around Seattle in my old neighborhood. It was nice out and I wasn’t inside a plane, so my mood surpassed the usual sinking feelings of that era. I saw a man approaching from the other side of the street. Just having finished a work trip that morning, my mind was still programmed to the friendly flight attendant setting.
“Hi, how’s it going?” I asked him from the sidewalk.
He looked at me as if I was wielding a baseball bat over my head, crazed and ready to smash it into the car parked in front of me.
He didn’t say hello back, and when I sat down at a table ten minutes later at a pub in the same Queen Anne neighbor, the server seemed personally annoyed that I chose her section and asked for a menu on top of that.
What would I do with all of this newfound friendliness and optimism in a city that’s repulsed by agreeableness and actively breeds neuroticism? (Which was cool and hip in the grunge era but became a real drag when the tech industry turned the morose vibes dystopian.)
The answer eventually presented itself: move to a place where my newfound extroversion and agreeableness would be appreciated or at least accepted, because my job had changed me.
You can take the girl out of the plane but not the plane out of the girl. Or something like that.
Stay fly,
Megan
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What an amazing writer you are! It’s like I’m on the plane experiencing this with you XO
Great writing.
I have always been kind to and grateful for flight attendants. The job seems very demanding. But you’ve brought me to a deeper of understanding.
So where is this new place that can contain your new level of bubbliness?