Take two beers and jump!

Have you all heard about the flight attendant who gave an expletive laced P.A., grabbed a couple of beers, and jumped down the slide? Of course you have and what a gift of a subject for a first blog.  Being a flight attendant, I have so much to say about this that it could (and might) fill a months' worth of blogs. 
Traveling these days can be so difficult on people - long lines, rude people, baggage fees, HINI scares, rude people, bad weather, missed connections, no food, TSA, rude people (oops - did I mention TSA and rude people in the same sentence? That's for another blog). Doesn't it just make you want to go flying?
Back to the "incident".  Now I don't know how FA Slater's day was going.  I do know there are trips when you have a mechanical on every flight, a medical emergency or two, your days are 13 or 14 hours and your layovers are 8 hours. Oh and the no food service, that applies to the flight attendants also. Some days we are starved! Perhaps Steven Slater was at the end of one of those trips. It is a FAA regulation that while an aircraft is on the ground it is unable to move if anyone is standing up, let alone removing their luggage from the overhead bins. Yet just about every other flight there is one or two passengers who feel this rule doesn't actually apply to them (I wonder if these people also think red lights are just a suggestion). Apparently this passenger forgot, didn't care, was more important than everyone else - take your pick - and began to gather her items before the aircraft was parked at the gate, clearly breaking federal regulations. When FA Slater approached the passenger to remind her of the rules, he was then cussed out and hit in the head with falling luggage. Now if someone was standing on the edge, that would be the push that would send him over, and it certainly did. Or at least down the slide.
I think what has captured every one's attention is the flourish with which he made his exit.  People hold him up as a "working class hero", someone who stood up for himself and said I'm not going to take it anymore. We all fantasize about what we will do on our last day on the job but he actually did it!
But it wasn't any system or company or big business that pushed Steven Slater to jump that day. It was another human being. What I hope people will realize is that after all is said and done, we are all in this together, whether on this earth or rocketing through the sky in a metal tube full of cramped, smelly, hungry, nervous, sick, jet-lagged humans.  Let's treat each other well, understand that sometimes we have to follow the rules, and that under no circumstances is it okay to be disrespectful to others.
As a fellow flight attendant, I wish him the best. We all have a love-hate relationship with this job and he did it for 18 years. That is a lot of stories and a lot of memories.