Steven Slater

Steven Slater. Sounds like he could be the brother of semi-masculine A.C. Slater from Saved by the Bell. But he's not. If you've been paying attention to the news the past few days, you've undoubtedly heard of the JetBlue flight attendant / steward / whateverthey'recalled and his amazing grab a beer and run out the airplane quit. That's the best saying that I could come up with for it? Ah, crap.

I've followed this story with a decent amount of interest the past few days and I have to say that I disagree with Steven Slater. 99%.

First of all, I have to say that we've all dreamed of quitting a job like that. Grabbing a beer, swearing at everybody, and then exiting out the emergency slide. What? Your place of business doesn't have an emergency slide? That part is pretty awesome and that's where the 1% of agreement comes from.

Here's why I disagree with him 99%, though.

Dude... SS... Your job is hospitality. You are paid to be nice to people. You are paid to give out Pepsi and pretzels and according to salary.com, you get paid about $38,000 a year to do it. Do you know that I work 60 hours a week at three jobs and don't make much more than that? Someone has to get paid to do it and that someone isn't me. Do you know why? Because I am not very nice. Even if someone paid me to be nice, I probably wouldn't last very long. Certainly not long enough to do it for as many years as you did. I'd last maybe a flight. Maybe. And that's only if I had access to the beverage cart.

Everywhere I read about online keeps talking about how great this guy is. I just don't see it. All he managed to do was a live reenactment of that scene from Half Baked where Scareface quits his job. That's pretty funny and all, I suppose, but if I wanna watch Half Baked, I'm gonna watch Half Baked. And there's no way that Steven Slater is half as funny as Dave Chappelle. Hell, he's not even half as funny as Jim Breuer, who I'm pretty sure is a highly functional autistic.

But the real reason why I have no sympathy for Steven Slater? It's because he works for an airline. I don't care that you don't like it when people get on their cell phones when the plane lands. I don't care that you don't like it when people jump up to get their bags from the overhead compartment. Let 'em. That's right. Let 'em pull out their phones. Let 'em get their luggage from the overhead bin. What do you care if they get ear cancer or get knocked unconscious by their Samsonite bag? That'd teach them a thing or two. It's an airline. The enemy.

In my life, I've been on 20 individual flights. Do you know how many delays and or cancelled flights I've endured? 6. That's 30% of the flights that I've taken that have been wrong. Do you know what would happen if I got, say, company payroll right only 70% of the time? That's right, I'd be looking for work, just like Steven Slater. And air hosts and air hostesses wonder why travelers are pissed off.

Don't support this guy. He's not a hero. He's not a chump. He's just some dude.