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“It basically is an assumed name, Elizabeth Sabin.” Isaac said her real name with such conviction that it made Elle laugh more. “The only people who know are the ground crew, and only because they handle your passport and are informed ahead of time of what scheme you and your department are running.”
“It’s not a scheme. It’s quality assurance. Besides… I do other things.” Elle cleared her throat when the laughter threatened to make her cough. “I want to know what the crew thinks about their jobs. If we want to retain all this great talent we’ve brought on board, so to speak, then I want to ensure they’re happy.”
“So, ask them?”
“You think they’re going to tell me the truth? Me? Elle Sabin? My name is all over their manuals and rulebooks. I’m listed as being a fluent Mandarin speaker who can eavesdrop better than their nosey family members. As soon as my picture leaks, that’s it for me. I’m lucky that my LinkedIn photo is from five years ago when I had brown hair and my old nose.” That deviated septum had been a godsend when Elle’s department decided she should go undercover while flying the LA-Singapore leg between meetings. Her old nose had been fine for all purposes except actually breathing. Her mother barely recognized her now. Change my hair, change my makeup, wear slightly different clothes… She would be figured out eventually. Until then? She was the eyes and ears in the air.
“How did you even come up with Sparrow? It sounds so fake.”
“It was my nickname in Girl Scouts. You know, what came to my mind when filling out the form. Besides, there are people out there who have the last name Sparrow. I Googled it.”
Isaac rolled his eyes. “You ready for this afternoon’s report?”
“I’ve collected a good bit of data already, so, yes. Bear in mind it won’t be the tent rally that the financial report was this morning, though. The rest of the board won’t be fist pumping and calling their stockbrokers when I’m done talking about lip gloss and kebayas.”
“The what now?”
“It’s the dress the flight attendants wear.”
“Right, right.”
“How’s your report going? You fought hard enough to get out of talking shop with Airtram. Any headway on Canada?”
“Nope.”
“Australia?”
“Sydney is thinking about it. There might not be enough room for another Singapore route, though. But we might hit a Beijing or Seoul route out of there.”
“It’s a start.”
“So far,” Isaac continued, “current passengers have put in requests for Vancouver-Tokyo and New York-Sydney routes so maybe that’s an angle we can take. You know, assuming we win the bid for the next route to open up from New York to anywhere in our wheelhouse.”
“We both worked for Delta. We know how it works.”
That was Elle’s subtle way of telling Isaac she wanted to change the subject. Preferably to something outside of work, like how his engagement was working out now that he had a more committed work schedule they could work around. She was a Silicon Valley protegee who kept their apartment neat while he traveled around the Pacific, but even Isaac complained about the housing costs in the Bay Area. Elle could only vaguely relate. She had a two-bedroom high rise in Seattle, but it was considerably cheaper than what her coworker paid for farther south.
They returned to the office in time for Elle to prepare her presentation in the main boardroom. Coworkers and fellow board members filtered in as they came back from lunch, most of them stuffed with drinks – both caffeinated and alcoholic – and looking like they wanted an afternoon nap. Elle began her talk by “accidentally” blasting some Pearl Jam from her phone. That woke everyone up as if a giant earthquake had hit LA.
“Employee morale remains high at the end of the first quarter,” she said well into her presentation. “Anonymous surveys from passengers show that we are meeting the standard of quality we set out to achieve, particularly in First and Business Classes. The flight attendants we poached from other airlines are worth their weight in gold as far as I’m concerned.”
“Good thing they don’t weigh very much,” one businessman muttered in jest to his neighbor.
Elle was pressured to ignore that. “The biggest kink we might run into with our well-oiled machine is the integration of Western crew on the horizon. Right now, most of our international cabin crews are sourced from other Asian airlines, and hiring fairs taking place in China, Singapore, and Japan. Our focus is on trilingual flight attendants who are, at a minimum, fluent in Mandarin and English. The American crews handling the shuttles between Seattle and LA are bilingual at best, and usually not in Mandarin. We are working on remedying this.”
Half of the table was already asleep again. Only Isaac put on a show that he was absolutely enthralled with his friend’s presentation.
“Our goal is to begin integrating crews by the summer travel season. The Singapore-LA route will be our test plane. I’ve been flying this route incognito for the past three months and have a good feeling of how to rearrange some of the crew to accommodate.”
“How are the incognito trips going?” asked Dustin. “They haven’t figured you out yet, have they?”
“If they have, the flight attendants have exquisite poker faces. The pilot James Fan who captains the flights is the only one who knows my real identity onboard, and that’s for safety. Otherwise, the cabin crew are intentionally kept in the dark as I travel under an assumed name.”
“Wonder how long that’s going to last,” said the only other woman at the table.
“My department believes that it’s imperative that they not know I’m a board member if I am to get my opinion of their service. If they knew, I’d be treated better than the usual passenger. Beginning next month, I’ll begin flying Economy on select flights to gauge service in that sector. We must ensure that our Economy passengers only have good things to say about our crew’s service.”
Dustin chuckled. “You’re a braver woman than I, and not only because I’m a man, Elle.”
