I Tried Working For An Airline So That You Don't Have To

Is working for an airline as glamorous as they say? Inquiring minds might want to know so I'm spilling the tea. 😁

Air Canada wingtip photo taken by yours truly

I’m fairly unqualified to speak about working for a major airline, as I only completed two weeks of training in my lifetime. However, that doesn’t mean I’m unqualified to express my emotionally unstable thoughts about it.

Let’s start with this…

I cried on the drive home from my THIRD day.

I’m not afraid to admit that I became completely unhinged during training. My brain felt like a homemade bomb that some lunatic learned how to build on the dark web. All my wires were frayed and smouldering at the end of each training day. I just wanted to hug my dog.

I hadn’t had to learn new things in decades, never mind several thousand things of airline magnitude. A small piece of me would have rather waited tables at a diner on a dirt road in the middle of the desert.

I wouldn’t have even been there if not for the pandemic.

Each day in that classroom, I wondered what it would be like when I graduated to live calls with actual customers who had spent two and a half hours on hold to change their flight reservation.

I’ve been the person on hold before and I was an a$$hole.

An average morning in airline training.

I had just wrapped up a year of pandemic unemployment when I scored the airline job. I successfully mastered the art of pyjama life, dog-mom life, and the banishment of all clocks and alarms.

Training for my airline job began at 8:30 a.m. each day, except I had to wake up at 5:30 because I live in the suburbs.

Let’s not talk about the commute because no matter how many pandemic years we endured, we all remembered the insanity-inducing experience of sharing the road with other humans.

To access the learning campus, we trainees first had to undergo COVID-19 testing. Every. Single. Day. That ray of sunshine happened at 7:30, a full and unpaid hour before class began.

Words cannot describe how instantly wakeful it is to shove a Q-tip up both nostrils, swirl it around in a vial, and then squeeze exactly three drops of nose junk onto what looked like a pregnancy testing stick. All at the buttcrack of dawn.

Inside the classroom.

There were roughly forty of us lost souls trying to achieve the glamorous life of becoming airline employees.

We learned that the company had condensed a nine-week training program into three weeks, desperately trying to return to full flight schedules after laying off an entire corporation’s worth of people during the pandemic.

“Speaking airline” was basically like trying to decipher The Da Vinci Code in eight seconds.

Each trainee was given twelve different logins for eighteen different computer systems displayed on two gigantic monitors, all of which are supposed to cohesively produce ONE airline ticket for the future passenger.

Out of the thirteen thousand SSR codes we had to use, I remember roughly three of them. And I had no idea what SSR stands for. Civilians call them airport codes. Why couldn’t we just be like civilians, dammit?

Within two weeks of carrying out practice bookings, I successfully double-billed and double-ticketed three families, accidentally left a dog in a kennel on the runway, and forgot someone’s infant child at the gate.

On the bright side, I did manage to send myself on an imaginary one-week vacation to Montego Bay with great success.

For the most part, all trainees spent our breaks sitting in the lunch lounge, crying behind masks and snacking on handfuls of peanuts. We had long forgotten how to pack a proper lunch.

After class each day.

I arrived home around 6:00 p.m., mostly due to inept drivers who had forgotten how to merge, as they hadn’t practiced commuting in eighteen months.

I greeted my dog, who no longer knew my name. COVID puppies did not adjust well to real life. I’d take her for a walk to rekindle our lost relationship, and end up lying in a patch of grass somewhere watching the sun go down while she chewed on a stick.

I finally made it to my kitchen by 7:30 p.m. and ate a dry baked potato for dinner because it’s the only thing I could cook in under five minutes.

Writing anything besides code notes became a distant and faint memory. My laptop had never been so ignored.

When I logged into social media and saw 167 notifications, I promptly closed it again because it gave me anxiety. Who has time for 167 of anything when they have to pop a sleeping pill to fall asleep early enough to wake and repeat this entire story?

When all was said and done, I sort of felt like I had served my country. I did it so that my fellow humans could reach their destinations with their dogs and infants intact, without accidentally paying for seven duplicate airline tickets.

Needless to say, my training wings never came off. I lost my shit and forgot my SSR codes one too many times ever to leave the runway. 😆

Flying over the gorgeous Canadian Rockies on my way to Vancouver in 2018. 😍

It has taken me four years to write this because, at first, I felt like a complete failure for not completing airline call center training. Millions of people do this job…why couldn’t I hack it?

I desperately wanted to make it because scoring a job with an airline felt prestigious. Doesn’t everyone want free flight perks?

In reality, airline jobs aren’t prestigious at all. Nor are they livable unless you’re a kept woman with a rich husband. Here in Canada, they only pay a couple of dollars above minimum wage. 😐 True story. I suppose they assumed every unemployed person emerging from COVID was desperate.

In case you’re wondering, I did NOT fail. I quit. And here’s that story…..

Have you ever worked for an airline? If so, did you find it prestigious or complicated as hell?