6 stories from a veteran flight attendant

In 'Cruising Attitude,' flight attendant Heather Poole shares stories from her years in the air.

4. One passenger wrote a critical letter after hours of help

By Ilter Kansiz

An elderly passenger boarded a flight Poole was working on and ordered Poole to bring her bag to her seat, which Poole did. The passenger then asked Poole to fold her sweater a certain way – making her do it again twice – as well as asking her to open the window shade for her multiple times. Finally, the passenger said she wanted to write a letter, so Poole gave her paper they had used for catering and gave the passenger her own pen. Then the passenger asked that the letter be taken to whomever was in charge. Poole gave it to her superior, only to find out that it was a complaint that Poole didn't have her hair in a hairnet.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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