Saturday, May 9, 2009

Shwayze Jumps!

I just flew in from Denver to Bozeman MT. As we were boarding the flight some guy in a Fedora hat and sunglasses with nasty brown scraggly hair a few inches past his shoulders, gets on slinging his guitar (which says PINK ROCK on its soft case) behind him and is annoyed by the person on his phone. "That is THE WORST IDEA I've ever heard," he ignores my hello and asks if there's a closet for his guitar. Great, I thought to my self, I have another one of those American Idol "finalists" who thinks they're so important just because they've been criticised by Simon Cowell, but obviously no too important, they're flying a regional airline to get to their show, in coach. "No" I answer shortly. Its been a long day and this rock star wannabe is already annoying me. He proceeds down the aisle, "The WORST" he repeats into his cell. Everyone else boards and the gate agent pulls the jet bridge away so I can close the main cabin door and we may be on our way. As I'm starting my announcement the scraggly haired white boy and his darker complected side kick start rushing to the front of the aircraft with a look of fury on their faces. I panicked! Are they going to attack me? Are they storming the flight deck? What's happening!?!? So I stop my announcement mid sentence and clutch the reciever, backing to the corner of the galley to avoid these crazy hooligans. To my surprise they turned and the black guy jumps the 2 foot gap from the plane to jet bridge, and as I see this I stop the other guy from making the same mistake. Who are these weirdos acting like terrorists who just pulled the pin on a bomb and are running for their lives as the plane is about to explode. "Stop! You cant do that!" I yelled. I'm personally responsible for every passenger on this plane and if home boy here would've missed the jet bridge and fallen 10 feet below to the concrete, I'd at the very least be fired. They stop and look at me, and the black guy tells me they forgot their phone, they left it charging up in the seating area. I've had hundreds of people leave things in the boarding area and I've never in 3 years had someone leap through the air off the air craft. So wrong in so many ways. "I don't care!" I respond, "You can not jump off the airplane, you need to tell me and I'll have someone go get your phone." The gate agent comes up after witnessing this chaos. "You can not do that!" She starts in on the guy in the jet bridge and the white guy next to me is saying, "I didn't jump!" Yeah well you were about to, I thought to my self. So she goes and gets their phone and tells them if they ever do that again she'll kick them off the flight. As they make their way down the aisle back to their luggage and seats, Manuel, the other flight attendant reprimands them as well. "You can NOT do that," He's says with his sassy attitude. "I know, I just had three people yell at me," the white guy points back at me, "Now you want to tell me too?"
"Yeah I'll tell you," Manuel is not happy, "And I'll kick you off my flight." They take their seats and the rest of the flight is pretty uneventful. As we're deplaning these guys are the last to get off and the black guy apologizes for the earlier incident as he passes me, and the white guy says, "So, do you wanna come to our show tonight?" I look at him, not recognizing his face, "Who are you?" He tells me he's Shwayze and they have a show tonight and he asked if he could put me on the guest list. "Sure, Kiffen." I gave him my name and he said I'm down plus a few.
My pilots overheard this and asked me what guest list I was on. "Have you heard of Shwayze?" They hadn't, I asked them if they'd heard the song "Corona and Lime," they hadn't. We get to the curb to catch our hotel shuttle and see Shwayze and friends getting into their Hummer Limo. "Do you know Shwayze?" My pilot asks our van driver, who looks about 22. "Yeah, not personally but I know who he is," the kid says. "That was him back their getting into the stretch hummer," my idiot pilot is trying to sound cool, when he doesn't even know who it is he's talking about.
"Oh cool!" the van driver says and I rolled my eyes. Gotta love rock n roll plane hoppers and name dropping pilots!