Here…Hold My Puke!

Ok, so you’re thinking…what the hell?  Well, here’s the story.

I fly for a regional airline in Alaska.  I won’t mention which one for many reasons.  Anyway, I’m scheduled to fly our brand new airplane.  When I say new, I mean it still has that “new car scent.”

So, a woman boards the airplane and honestly I thought she had tied one on before the flight.  She seemed pretty drunk.  You see, it’s a favorite pastime for some natives in Alaska to down a bottle of booze before a flight, that way they can enjoy their buzz while sitting in their home in the dry village, hence my suspicion.  Turns out she wasn’t drunk, just sick.  There was no turbulence to speak of except a little chop on approach to the airport and we didn’t really think much of it.

sick

As I was standing outside at the bottom of the stairs thanking people, one lady asked, “You’re going to help her, right?”  I went back up the stairs to find our sick woman had thrown up all over herself.  Thankfully, she got most of it in the sick sack and on herself.  There goes the new car scent! (Remember…this is a brand new airplane.)  Here’s this lady holding an unopened bottle of orange juice in one hand and her bag-o-puke in the other.  After she managed to get out of her seat and into the aisle, she did the most puzzling and amazingly stupid thing anyone could do at a time like that…SHE TRIED TO HAND ME HER BAG OF CHUNKS!  What the hell?!?  After telling her I wasn’t going to take the bag, she did something even more amazing…she looked at me like I was the biggest asshole in the world for not taking that terrible burden from her.

She made it to the door mostly without incident, but remember the orange juice?  Just as she reached the door, she started losing her grip on the juice bottle.  In an effort to save her juice, she spills puke all over herself and the airstair door.  What happens next continues to baffle me.  Instead of giving up and letting go of the UNOPENED PLASTIC bottle of juice, she purposely pours the rest of her bag of disease infested stomach contents out onto the stairs, hand railing and onto the ground.  (Did I mention this plane is NEW?)  Even better than this…she steps off the airplane and walks to the terminal never looking back at her wonderful artwork!  She just left us to deal with it.  No apology, no offer to help clean it up.  NOTHING!

Needless to say, I donned the rubber gloves, gathered the cleaning supplies and went to work.

Edit: Since this incident, I’ve had one other passenger get sick in a plane.  She was very nice and apologetic.  The first thing she said to me was, “Where do you keep your cleaning supplies?”

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