If you just got back from Mars, Steven Slater is a JetBlue flight attendant who quit his job in a most memorable fashion last Monday. He got ticked off at a passenger, went on the PA and cussed out her and all the other passengers, grabbed a couple beers from the galley, triggered the inflatable escape chute, and drove off to get some from his boyfriend. Here’s the now-inevitable Taiwanese CGI reenactment:
That is exactly how it happened.
My first thought was, “Wow, what a douche.” But then I started thinking about what a sucky job that is, being a flight attendant. Rude passengers, passengers who are rude, people who buy plane tickets and then behave unpleasantly, etc. I can see how that would get to you after a while. Plus, everybody else was celebrating him as some sort of folk hero, a “Take This Job and Shove It” for the 21st Century. Yeah, okay. Go, Steve Slater!
Oops. Stop Steve Slater. CBS New York:
Many, if not most, of the passengers who are now being interviewed by Port Authority detectives about what happened on Monday on that bizarre JetBlue flight with Slater seem to be giving a very different version of his behavior during the flight, than the picture most people have of him — who were not there.
Howard Deneroff, for example, is a producer for CBS Radio’s Westwood One. Slater, he said, got pretty aggressive about Deneroff not having his seat in the upright position.
“He did hit the back of my seat and said, ‘Pull your seat up. It can’t be reclined.’ It was not reclining and I indicating it to him and then he says, ‘Pull your seat up.’ I said I didn’t recline the seat and he leaned over, hit the button to try to pull it up himself. He hit the back of the seat, but it didn’t move,” Deneroff said.
It didn’t move because it was already up, Deneroff said.
Other passengers say Slater was carrying a drink around during the flight and seemed to be drunk. And that story about him getting hit in the head by a passenger’s luggage, which supposedly triggered the whole thing, might not be true because he was already bleeding from the forehead when they boarded. And it sounds like he was just rude and angry and hostile in general.
Slater held a press conference outside his house yesterday afternoon, and here’s what he said:
“Thank you all so much. It’s been amazing, the support, the love and everything that’s been brought to me and given to me by the community and my friends and the industry at large. It has been absolutely wonderful.”
Sounds like it might get less and less wonderful for Slater as more and more eyewitnesses speak up. At least this will teach me to trust my instincts. If I think somebody sounds like a jerk, he’s probably a jerk.
Present company excluded, LOL!
(Hat tip: Hot Air)
