Cindy Lange-Kubick: Warm cookies and the economy
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I’ve thought a lot this week about a woman I barely know.
Her first name is Paulina, I do know that.
I know she served me warm chocolate chip cookies on a flight home from Washington, D.C., Monday afternoon.
I know she had dimples and a shiny brown ponytail that swung like a metronome when she walked.
And that ever since she was a little girl she wanted to be a flight attendant.
And for 15 years she’d lived that dream.
Warm cookies, wide seats — two things I love about flying Midwest Express. But it took a long time to get my cookies from Paulina. Every time I’d look up from 16B I’d see Paulina, paused and talking to one passenger, then another.
Good grief, I thought, what could be so important?
Finally, Paulina and the silver cart were next to me.
“Cookies?”
She smiled.
“Napkin?”
She paused then to talk to me and to my seatmates, too.
“I'm losing my job,” she said. “Tomorrow is my last day.”
Her airline had been sold, flights sub-contracted out, she explained. The new carrier was letting three of four flight attendants go. More than 300 jobs lost.
She’d been letting people know as she walked down the aisle. She knew some of them, business travelers, frequent Midwest fliers.
A passenger told her yesterday what she was saying was inappropriate, she said rolling her eyes, shiny with tears.
She didn’t care.
Someone else had a question: Will you still have the cookies?
“Can you believe it?” Paulina said. “I just walked away.”
And so the world goes.
By now most of us know someone this sputtering economy has kicked in the teeth.
By now most of us have felt the pain of prices as they keep rising, like that silver and blue Boeing floating over storm clouds.
If it’s not us out of a job, though, it’s easier not to think too much about what might come next.
That quarterly 401(k) statement from JP Morgan? Straight to the recycling bin, unopened. It’ll get better.
Fill the tank? Grudgingly.
Pay the mortgage? Thank goodness you can.
But feel entirely immune? Hardly.
After the cookies, Paulina returned with a pamphlet. Sorry, she said, she had only one copy, passed from passenger to passenger — the ones who cared enough to want to know more.
It told of concessions the pilots and first mates had been asked to make, giving back as much as 75 percent of their salaries.
Flight attendants, she said, had a similar ultimatum.
But that was then and now a new airline was about to take over her route. The planes would still say Midwest Express, she said. But the people inside would almost all be new.
She didn’t know how she’d make it through her last day, Paulina told us, clutching her Kleenex.
“It’s heartbreaking, you know?”
By then we knew about her daughter in college. Her home in Columbia, Mo. Her 17-year marriage to the boyishly handsome man in the photograph she pulled from her pocket.
She had faith, she said, she’d make it. But, still, she said, it sucked. It really did.
Paulina walked back up the aisle, ponytail swinging.
When our plane landed in Omaha she was there, next to the cabin door, cheeks dimpling, thanking her passengers for flying.
Some of us hugged her. Some promised to write letters, hoping someone would listen.
Some of us wondered (selfishly) whether there would still be warm chocolate chip cookies the next time we flew on the airline that claimed the Best Care in the Air.
One thing we all knew for certain: One casualty of the new economy, her name embroidered over her heart, would not be there to pass them out.
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
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It's too bad about Midwest Express, always liked flying that airline, but no matter what the background an airline crew shouldn't use their captive audience as a sounding board for how their company is treating them. "