Hi Snas,
I won't deny - I see my job as a paid jolly.
For 48 hours I get to have a whale of a time in Los Angeles or Singapore or Hong Kong. It's great. But then there's the bit at 4:00am in the morning when you look at your watch and realise there's two hours to go until you get a bit of sleep - this, after you've already been up for the best part of 18 hours becaues it's just impossible to get a good sleep in the middle of the day before a trip.
Then there's the bit when you land in the UK at 6:00am in the morning having been awake for 24 hours or more because you find it impossible to sleep before pickup in New York and with the time change you've been up since 3am local.
Our ground colleagues volunteering to work as crew won't feel the impact of this - people do it when they go on holiday all the time. But doing it week in, week out really takes it out of you.
Then there's the time when you have to defib someone who could quite easily be your own mother, father or grandparent. The time when you have to wrestle a disruptive passenger to the ground and handcuff them, despite being smacked by them and bitten by them, in a way that causes them as little injury as possible.
Yes - this job is a paid jolly, but it's a paid jolly that comes with a hell of a lot of responsibility and plays absolute havok with your body and your personal life.
But I don't need nor want sympathy for that - I signed up for it. What I do want - and hope for - is that the public sees that there's a lot more to this job than meets the eye.
Ask the passengers of the BA038 if we're overpaid. And ask the family of the man whose life was saved by a BA crew in New York recently if we're overpaid.