A former flight attendant has decried the position that was once her ‘dream job’ after becoming disillusioned with the realities of the role.
Annie Hernandez was a recent grad who decided to seek out work as soon as possible to begin paying off her student loans.
At 22, she landed a flight attendant job at Delta, which she thought was a dream come true as it allowed her to travel around the world – something that she hadn’t been able to do much of growing up.
But, as she revealed in a slideshow on TikTok, the grunt work that came with it quickly wore her down – and, in successive selfies, she went from broadly smiling to gradually appearing less enthusiastic to outright crying while on the clock.
Annie Hernandez started out excited about her flight attendant job at Delta – but her enthusiasm quickly faded as the realities of the job sunk in
‘Watch my smile fade as my dream job turned into a nightmare,’ she declared in the first of several slides apparently documenting her short stint at the airline.
‘This is not as great as I anticipated but it’s okay I know the work is worth it,’ she wrote in text overlay on a selfie taken from the jump seat.
In the first of two crying selfies, she wrote: ‘Company took advantage of me, and I was fear mongered into saying nothing.’
In a second crying-selfie, she bemoaned: ‘Tears again.
‘Learned that I’m just a number to this company, they don’t care about me or my wellbeing at all.’
The slideshow concluded: ‘Me on my flight home after my last day. Dreams crushed.’
Annie went on to outline her reasons for quitting what was once her dream gig in two other TikTok videos.
Her first reason was her health, arguing: ‘When I was working for the airline, my health suffered in so many ways that I should not have had happened to me.’
Among the things Annie struggled with in the position was maintaining her health amid the brutal schedule as well as not seeing friends or family for long stretches at a time
She then explained that she was not able to work out because of the ‘demanding schedule’ and the physical labor involved in the job, and that by the time she was off the clock she felt too drained to go to the gym.
With that, she felt that the food options were unhealthy, making her ‘feel so disgusting,’ and wasn’t able to commit to meal-prepping.
She then described how the job exacerbated her anxiety as well, given she never knew what to expect day to day.
Another major gripe was ‘constantly’ being away from her friends and family, while also being ‘completely alone in these huge cities’ – all of which took a ‘toll’ on her mental health.
‘Also, sleep? Never got enough of it, because I was working super early mornings, super later nights. Redeyes,’ she elaborated.
More broadly, she had serious gripes with the ‘scheduling aspect’ of the flight attendant life.
‘People don’t know this, but flight attendants don’t get paid whenever their flight is delayed,’ she said, mentioning one instance she was delayed six hours for which she wasn’t compensated extra.
She further emphasized that flight attendants ‘just generally have no say in [their] schedule’ – nor do they have ‘a say in where [they] go.’
‘Basically the company owns you for the first few years. They say where you go. They say what time you go. You just genuinely have no say in your schedule,’ she went on.
Yet another of Annie’s major gripes was about the lack of work-life balance.
‘When it comes to work-life balance, did not feel like I had that at all,’ she said.
With that, Annie said that the first-year pay was ‘horrible’ and that she was not getting enough money for what she was ‘dealing with.’
DailyMail.com has contacted Delta for comment.