6 stories from a veteran flight attendant

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

3. One experienced passenger helped them out

By Sidney Shapiro

While on probation for their first six months, Poole and the other new flight attendants were required to wear their skirts a half-inch above their knees – a rule that more experienced flight attendants tended to ignore once probation was over. So one glance at their longer hemlines meant that their co-workers knew they were new at the job. One first-class passenger even realized that Poole and her fellow flight attendant were new and so decided to help them out with their duties. The passenger picked up glasses and gave back coats to the other passengers. "The passengers gave him a round of applause," Poole writes. "We, the crew, slid him a bottle of wine."

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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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