Taken by the Wind » Travel Jobs

Big News: I Have My Own Column!

Reannon Muth — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:49:29 +0000

Before Nicaragua or Guatemala, before I got a job with an airline or lived in Japan and before this blog existed or I even knew what the word ‘blog’ meant, there was India. And the four months I spent hauling my sweaty self up and down mountains and away from stampeding elephants and spitting camels.

Here are a few pictures from that fascinating experience.

Don't eat me!

Snakes, Me and a Crazy Holy Man

Baby Elephant and Me...He kept trying to push me over. Aw, that's love.

Camel Safari

What's scarier...the food or my hair?

Would you eat this?

Are you captivated yet?

Well, I’ve recently been hired by Rumbum.com to write about all of my adventures, starting with when I left NYC and flew to India, all the way through to Nicaragua (and beyond?). It’s a weekly column and you can check back every Monday to read the latest installment or subscribe to it’s RSS feed and receive updates in your email inbox.

It’s called ‘Hello, Big Adventure’ and here’s the link to the first post in the series:

http://rumbum.com/1282-goodbye-big-apple-hello-big-adventure#continue_post

What do you think?

PS Most of these photos were taken by my cousin Anderson. He was nice enough to let me steal borrow them. If you’d like to read about his RTW trip or about the time he cycled through SE Asia, you can check out his blog, Watch Out World.

Soon to be Unemployed?!

Reannon Muth — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:41:01 +0000

: Air Hostess, courtesy of Moco Loco Art

I might lose my job.

I say might because right now everything is up in the air, but it’s looking like I’ll be unemployed again starting the end of the January.

I’ve known since I started that this might happen. I was hired on as a seasonal (I.e, temporary), employee which means that I was only guaranteed employment until the beginning of 2010. My hope was that a permanent position would become available before my contract ended, but unfortunately (fortunately?) life has other plans for me.

What those plans are exactly, I’m not sure. I’ve been bouncing around some ideas the last few days, one of which involves moving to South America to teach English and study Spanish. When I was in Colombia a couple of months ago, I met this British guy who was taking a three-week intensive Spanish course for only $180 US and that included all of his meals and a discount on his hotel stay.

As part of my compensation for finishing my employment contract, I get four, free round trip tickets to anywhere my airline flies. So since my airline flies to South America, I’m thinking of taking the money I’ve been saving to buy a car and using it to fund a move to Chile or Argentina.

….What do you think? Should I move country again or try to find another airline job?

The Mini-Vaca

Reannon Muth — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:29:00 +0000

Minature New York by Moon Pie

I used to be anti the mini-vaca. A long weekend in Aruba? No thanks. Five days in Athens? Naw, I’d rather stay home. A few days out of a lifetime to be thrown away at a seaside resort wasn’t giving the city or country the respect it deserved. What could one possibly hope to absorb of a country’s culture, history or language in such a short time frame?

But then I started working for an airline and now I have a dilemma. Because in the aviation industry the Mini-vaca is king. In fact, when you can fly anywhere you want for free and only have a limited number of days off, it’s really all you have.

Rome may’ve not been built in a day but if you work for an airline, visiting it for the day isn’t uncommon. I’ve talked to co-workers who’ve taken the red-eye to Paris or Hong Kong, sight-seed during the day, partied all night and then hopped back on a flight home the following morning.

It’s also not unheard of for airline employees to live lives that span multiple states, or even countries, for that matter. A flight attendant might, for example, live in Texas and commute to Los Angeles for work. Her boyfriend may live in Chicago, her hairstylist in New York and her dentist in Seattle. For the average person, this is might be mind-boggling. Because to the average person, a ride in an airplane is a special treat; a once or twice a year event that’s exciting and perhaps a little fear-inducing. To an airline employee though, an airplane is seen as nothing more than an employee shuttle bus or air taxi service.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a customer service agent in New York who regularly uses the few hours he has in between work shifts to head to the beach to sunbathe…in Puerto Rico. Another one of my co-workers frequently flies to Las Vegas from where we’re stationed in San Francisco for dinner. It sounds crazy but it actually makes sense when you consider that it only takes an hour to fly to Vegas and another ten minutes to take the employee shuttle from the airport to the strip of casinos. And if you factor in California rush hour traffic and the fact that he lives two hours from the airport, it’s actually faster (not to mention cheaper), for him to grab a bite at an all-you-can-eat casino buffet in Vegas than for him to drive to his neighborhood Wendy’s.

What this all amounts to is an industry of workers accustomed to warp-speed, wam-bam travel. It’s ADD, Tasmanian Devil, whirlwind travel and it’s bizarre…and it makes me wonder: What’s the point? It’s like, “Well, I guess I can squeeze in a trip to Barbados in between my orthodontist appointment in Tuscon and my cousin’s bachelorette party in Boston. Might as well cross that one of the list while I’ve got the time.” In fact, some of my co-workers could list you off a list a mile long of cities or country’s they’ve visited over the years. But does 24 hours in Honolulu count as a visit to Hawaii, if you never ventured away from Waikiki beach? And does 30 hours at an airport hotel in Sydney constitute stepping foot in Australia?

Two months ago, I met a grounds crew member who claimed to have visited all 50 states in the United States. An impressive feat for anyone, sure..that is until he revealed that he’d knocked all 50 off his list in a span of a few days. The icing on the cake was that he never as much as stepped foot outside a single one of the airports and only stayed in each state long enough to chat with the gate agents and buy a souvenir magnet from one of airport gift shops.

In traveling this way, yes we see the world, but is it worth it when our only view is a jet-lagged, blurry one from the airport freeway? If we’re not gaining some insight or perspective from the experience or learning something new, then aren’t we missing the point the point of travel entirely?

That said, it’s cold enough in San Francisco right now to make a field trip to Florida look pretty damn appealing….Who knows, maybe I’ll hop down to Miami for a few hours on my day off next week?

How far would you go to be able to fly for free?

Reannon Muth — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:58:00 +0000

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve disappeared to these past few weeks, you can look no further than the International terminal at the airport in San Franicsco. It seems that lately I’ve been working so many 17 hour shifts (yes, that’s 17 hours straight), that I’ve practically taken up permanent residence in the airport. I’m like Tom Hanks in the movie Terminal, only instead of camping out in some, cozy, abandoned concourse, I sleep on a make-shift bed (made out of two plastic chairs), in the employee break-room.

And if that sounds a bit extreme to you, well it’s all par for the course when you work for an airline. Back when I first started, I used to think that my co-workers were crazy when they told me that they regularly did this. No way was a job worth sleeping on a pile of abandoned airplane magazines with the “Attention in the concourse. The airport is now at threat level orange…” announcement ringing in your ears all night. Free, unlimited air travel or not, my downtime was too important to give up for a job that barely pays over minimum wage.

But it’s amazing how quickly your priorities change when a week-long trip to Colombia is dangled in front of your eyes. A chance to explore South America with one of my best friend’s from Germany? Sure, I’ll sign my life away. And then before I knew it, I was shivering in a sleeping bag in my car in the airport employee parking lot, trying to block out the smell of jet fuel and ignore the roar of the plane engines overhead that were so loud, they made the entire car vibrate.

Because when you only have four hours between when one shift ends and the other begins, wasting precious sleep time on the drive to and from work just seems silly. And sleeping on the carpeted floor in the supervisor’s office and then paying $10 to use the airport shower starts to seem like a perfectly rational solution.

But as I found out the hard way, three hours of sleep is not enough to get you through a shift of canceled flights and irate passengers. And caffeinated beverages only get you so far…In the middle of my 10th work day in a row, I had a melt down.

At least that’s the only way I can explain why I started crying at the ticket counter. Yes, I actually burst into tears, and right in the middle of checking in a passenger. I was so mortified, I just mumbled something about the bag tag printer being jammed and then ducked behind the counter to try to pull myself together. Unfortunately the problem with pep talks that begin with “Stop crying!” is that they just make you cry even harder.

Thankfully the man I was checking in pretended not to notice. He just smiled and looked sort of confused as I explained to him in a shaky voice, my eyes brimming with tears, that his flight would be departing at gate A12.

Afterwards, I excused myself, walked outside and sat on the long-term parking bus stop in a complete daze. I felt like I was 80 years old and suffering from arthritis. My bones and joints ached and my head was pounding. I had a chest cold and a fever and the only thing I’d consumed all day was three red bulls and a hand-full of raisins.

What the Hell was I doing to myself? I felt like I’d thrown myself into a war zone. I was a prisoner of war, held hostage by my job and subjected to mind games and deprived of sleep and adequate food (I’m sorry but stale sandwiches from the airport food court do not count). This was torture. And the most insane part of it was, was that I’d volunteered for it. I was driving myself crazy and all so that I’d be able to a week off and go to Colombia, of all places.

Sometimes I wonder if all the stress and insomnia is worth it. Perhaps it would be better if I just got a real job that paid more so that I could afford to purchase airfare like a normal person. Because with every airline competing so fiercely for business right now, flights are fairly inexpensive these days. Just last weekend, for example, I checked-in passengers who’d bought their tickets from San Francisco to New York online for only US $29.00.

The irony of the job is that while I have these wonderful travel benefits, I get paid too little to be able to enjoy them. Sure our flights are free, but that’s only a small portion of the total cost of travel. When you factor in the added expense of hotels, dining out and sight-seeing, a weekend trip to anywhere can cost hundreds of dollars.

Furthermore, when you live in a city as expensive as San Francisco, the cost of living is so high that it takes nearly all of your pay-check just to be able to make rent. Most of my co-workers either live with their parents or else rely on a spouse or significant other’s source of income to make ends meet.

It’s for reasons like these that there are days when I fantasize about quitting; about trading in the free flights for a desk job somewhere. But then days like tomorrow stop me…because tomorrow I’m flying to Los Angeles for the day so that I can get a haircut…for no other reason because I can.

It’s for reasons like this one that I love working for an airline.

What It’s Like to Work as an Airline Customer Service Agent

Reannon Muth — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:50:00 +0000

I love watching the reality show Airline. It’s not on TV anymore (it went off the air in 2004), but you can watch entire episodes of it on Video Google.

The A&E show documents the behind-the-scenes drama of working for an airline, specifically Southwest Airlines.

I’ve posted a few full-length episodes below, which I hope you’re able to view (you might have a tough time if you’re trying to watch them from outside the US). They feature the typical problems a customer service agent encounters on a daily basis (situations like canceled or overbooked flights, drunk or irate passengers, etc).

Keep in mind when watching though, that the director taped a week’s worth of film and at four different airports and then edited that down to 25 minutes of the most dramatic footage. So naturally working at an airport isn’t always as chaotic as the show makes it out to be. But I’d say that I probably get about one problem passenger per eight hour shift and sometimes more if the flight’s been delayed or canceled.

They had a British version of the show too, Airline UK, which followed the employees of the airline Easy Jet and Britannia (which is now off the air too). I like this one even better than the Southwest version, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to find full-length episodes of it on the web. I posted a nine minute clip of it below.

If you’re interested in working for an airline and want to know what it’s like, this is a good way to get a taste of what you’ll be up against.