When I was nineteen, I, along with hundreds of other people from across Latin America, got hired by Braniff International to train as a flight attendant. According to the managing director at the company’s Rio base (I remember her name but am not going to disclose it here), the airline had recently purchased an unspecified number of brand-new Boeing 747s and needed to boost its service staff numbers accordingly. On Easter Sunday, 1980, my future classmates and I boarded a 747 operated by Lufthansa (?) bound for Dallas-Fort Worth, where Braniff had its headquarters and training center.
Upon returning to Rio a few weeks later, I was eager to put all I had learned during my training into practice and get to work. So it was with a feeling of anticipation I went to the crew scheduling office that Monday, as a newly-baked flight attendant, to collect my very first working schedule.
“You’re not scheduled on any flights next week,” the scheduling officer told me.
“No flights for me next week?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“We’re fully staffed for all of next week’s flights. We need no additional personnel.”
“All right,” I said. “How about the week after?”
The woman leafed through some papers, then said: “You’re not scheduled on any flights the week after either.”
Astonished, I blurted, “What do you mean, ‘I’m not scheduled’? Am I not supposed to go to work now that I’m fully trained?”
She shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“But I don’t understand!” I said. “Braniff hired me and then trained me to work as a flight attendant. How can I do that when there are no flights available?”
She shrugged again. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“But I want to work!” I said, desperation starting to creep into my voice.
“You don’t have to worry, honey,” she replied. “It won’t impact your wages. You’re going to be paid your wages just as usual.”
“But I want to WORK!” I reiterated.
The scheduling officer let out a loud, demonstrative sigh. “Look,” she said, “you’ll get paid the same as everyone else, work or no work. Why don’t you take the chance to go to London, Paris or Rome, or any destination that catches your fancy? As you know, Braniff staff can fly to any destination where we operate at a 90% discount. Enjoy the fact that you’ll be paid a full wage despite not having to put in the work and go travel the world!”
“But I don’t feel like going on holiday before I’ve even had a chance to start my career,” I insisted. “I’m a fully trained flight attendant, and I want to work!”
This curious discussion continued for some time. Eventually, the scheduling officer managed to find a flight, three weeks hence, that happened to be one flight attendant short. She scheduled me to work on that flight, which I did.
The few weeks following that one flight saw a repetition of that same surrealistic situation described above. No flights, no working schedule. Instead, the scheduling officer put me on standby, which meant that I couldn’t leave my city in case a member of the regular crew came down with a cold or something and was unable to work. In that case, I’d stand in for her or him. To my disappointment, that never happened.
I kept returning to the office and nagging the scheduling officer. I wanted to fly. I wanted to work! That was the very reason I’d taken the job — to work! But every negotiation I had with her was an uphill struggle. I, demanding to work, and she not being able to accommodate me. She’d sigh and roll her eyes as soon as she spotted me. “You, again!” She’d say. And I’d reply, “Yes, here I am again, and I want to work! How come there are never any flights? I can’t understand it! It doesn’t make any sense!”
These and questions similar to these went unanswered. I wasn’t the only flight attendant unable to get an assignment on a flight, mind you. All other newly hired flight attendants were experiencing the same situation. They had no objections to this state of affairs, however. Most of my colleagues were at least a few years older than I was, and their outlook on “work” was way more cynical than mine. Unlike me, they felt as if they’d hit the jackpot: no need to work, full pay, travel to your heart’s content for 10% of the usual airfare. What’s there to complain about? We’ve been so lucky to land this job! It’s easy street all the way, baby, it’s positively my cup of tea, come on, let’s enjoy this opportunity to the fullest, what are you grumbling about, Lydia? It’s the job of a lifetime!
“Job of a lifetime”? Seriously? I was feeling confused and very uneasy about the whole situation. I’d never heard of a job where you weren’t expected to pitch in one way or another in order to earn your wages. Yes, I was young, sure, but I was no fool. Something was going on with this job that just wasn’t right.
Upon entering the office one day, and once again being met with sighs and eyes rolling towards the sky, I heard the scheduling officer say:
“You know, if you’re so determined to get your hands dirty, perhaps you should transfer to our Panama base. They are somewhat short on cabin personnel over there.”
Fearing that I might have misunderstood her, I asked, “Do you mean one gets to work over there?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. They need people there more than we do here. So, if you transfer to the base in Panama City maybe you’ll get to fly more often.”
“Where do I sign?” I replied.
And so, I transferred to Panama. The local climate was torrid and horrid and I stayed indoors with the air-conditioning turned on at full blast most of the time, watching through my window as two of my colleagues — sisters Dorothy and Denise — frolicked inside and about the hotel’s swimming pool. I didn’t envy them one bit, and we ended up becoming good friends, particularly Dorothy and me. Being big sisters, we soon found common ground.
Transferring to the Panama base turned out to be the right decision. I got to fly. I got to work. I learned Spanish “by osmosis”, i.e., simply by listening to people speaking the language and then attempting to imitate them. The hotel was nice enough, and it had a very friendly staff. Moreover, this hotel happened to house Panama City’s coolest disco. The DJ was a soft-spoken, sweet guy who went by Fofy but whose real name was Gustavo. He was very receptive to us young girls’ wishes and played all the disco tunes we asked him to play: Call Me, by Blondie; Souvenirs by Voyager; McArthur Park and Last Dance by Donna Summer; Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie by Baccara; and El Collar de Clodomiro by Willy Chirino, which was all the rage in the Caribbean back then. We had a ball on that dance floor! For the first time in my life, I felt free and somewhat in control of my life. Here I was, working, earning my own money, and dancing in my leisure time. One evening, alone in my hotel room, I even dared to make a call to a local radio station and ask them to play Call Me:
“Me gustaría mucho si ustedes quisieran tocar Llámame de Blondie.” And they played the song. For me! I almost cried with exhilaration.
The downside to being based in Panama was that I was missing my family terribly. Many nights I cried myself to sleep longing for my parents, my sister, my two brothers, and our cats. At heart, I am a family girl.
After a few months, I’d had enough of the oppressive, unrelenting Caribbean heat. I left Panama and went back to Rio. And it was at that time that things were beginning to unravel at Braniff. At that point, I knew in what direction the wind was blowing. I’d seen the signs at work. The gossip. The intrigue. The rivalry among colleagues. The veiled threats: “You’re not wearing any lipstick, don’t you know the rules? Take care you don’t get reported back to base”. There were rumors about the presence of Braniff spies passing off as passengers on board our flights whose job it was to inform on female crew members with unvarnished nails, unrouged cheeks, or long hair not kept in a strict bun. Naturally, the regulations regarding the appearance of male flight attendants were significantly less demanding; as a male cabin attendant, you were expected to show up at work fresh from the shower, clean-shaven, and with your hair newly cut in a classic hairstyle.
I can’t speak about the Braniff of the 60s and 70s, and I can’t speak about the Braniff that operated domestic flights inside the US. But the Braniff of Latin America in 1980 was just… well, ludicrous. The disorganization; the sheer incompetence on the part of the managing staff and administration; the bizarre workflow on board, where the passengers in first class, which consisted of a half-dozen rows of armchairs at the most, were served food out of a trolley, whereas the staff in coach had no trolley and had to run the gauntlet between the galley in the aft and the cabin’s forward bearing heavy Bakelite trays topped with robust China plates, bowls and cups, sturdy drinking glasses and real cutlery. There wasn’t a single item made of plastic on those trays, so their weight was significant. That manner of waiting on passengers was what Braniff really meant by “flying colors”, which, incidentally, was the airline’s proud slogan.
Soon after returning to Brazil, I, and everyone else based in Rio — some three-hundred people — were summoned to a compulsory emergency meeting at the base. The purpose of the meeting soon became clear: it was to inform us that Braniff was facing serious financial difficulties and would have to lay off all of its service staff in Latin America. This news caused a veritable commotion in the audience. People started asking questions, demanding explanations as to why Braniff, who’d only recently carried through such an aggressive hiring campaign throughout the continent, was now threatening to sacrifice our very livelihood. What was the reason for this 180-degree turn? First, you hire hundreds of people, and a mere few months later you want us to disappear, just like that? What’s going on here?
But alas! We got no straightforward answers to any of our questions; not one. All the managing director would do was repeat how very sorry they were. And then she said:
“Those among you who are young, who perhaps still live with your parents; those who do not have mortgages to pay or children to support… We’d like to ask you to be the first ones to surrender your jobs. Doing so will enable those of your colleagues who have greater need of an income to stay at Braniff a little longer while they look for a new job.”
Expectantly, she eyed the audience. Not a sound. Not a movement. People simply sat on their chairs, looking either at the floor or at the ceiling, examining their nails, or fixedly staring straight ahead with perfectly expressionless features.
“So…” she resumed, “I beg of you: please, think of your colleagues. All of you, everyone, will have to go eventually, that I can promise you. But which among you are willing to give up your jobs now, today? Any volunteers…?”
Silence. Faces uniformly turned away from the woman on the podium.
Suddenly, someone stood up, and immediately all eyes converged on her.
I reckon you can guess who that was.
There and then, I surrendered my travesty of a job at Braniff International. As a result, I was extravagantly lauded by the managing director and enthusiastically applauded by all. I can assure you, though, that no one was feeling happier, or more relieved, than I. I’m not one for playing games, and that particular game had been going on for far too long already.
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