Mind Your Language!

The other week during a night flight, as I was walking to the back galley, a passenger waved me down and asked for vodka.

A couple of other people asked me for Coke, juice and so on.

I delivered the drinks and made my way to the cockpit with the pilots' meals. On returning down the cabin into Economy, the same passenger again requested a vodka. At this stage I'd already gotten lots of orders so by the time I made it back to his seat, he was asleep.

I left the vodka, with a glass of ice & lemon on the table.

About thirty minutes later, my supervisor came back into the galley while we were eating, and she was laughing, but like she was trying not to show it. Behind her was the passenger who'd asked me for the drinks, looking quite agitated and holding a now-melted glass of ice with a vodka miniature in hand.

My suprvisor explained to me that he was upset because he'd kept getting the wrong drink.

Turns out this guy had a thick European accent (which had gone unnoticed via his one-word responses to our questions) and had actually been asking for WATER.

Oh the fun of language barriers!!

Once & For All...

To answer the age-old question...

Q. If three people are sitting in a full row on the plane, who gets the middle armrests?



A. The person in the middle. Why? Because the person in the window gets to lean their head on the window, and the person on the aisle gets the aisle armrest and to lean out into the aisle* every so often. The sucker in the middle gets nothing but the solace of leaning their elbows on the two middle armrests to ward off the fat spillover of two complete strangers.

(*But please, not when the beverage cart is in the aisle)

Yes, I have had to have this discussion with passengers on board. And yes, they were all (outwardly at least) adults.

If you have any other airline "mysteries" you'd like solved, leave a question in the comments!

---------------------
Image: Prop airline chairs from the tv series "LOST"- from Google Images