AIRLINE staff maintain a warm smile even for hen parties on gin who need a piss during take-off. These careers pay you for kindness to arseholes:
Flight attendants
Cabin crew used to be an envied job, with downtime in Tahiti drinking Campari and soda by swimming pools, flirting with men called Paolo and women called Suki. Now it involves herding pissed-off cattle onto planes, keeping them from kicking off for three hours and grinning throughout. The grins are of loathing.
Nurses
It’s remarkable how nurses maintain their chipper demeanour in the face of everything from aggressive drunks to whiners to death. It can’t be the low wages, long hours or being fined £100 by the hospital car park for overstaying by nine minutes. It must be the warm glow of knowing that Boris once stood outside No 10 and clapped them.
Teachers
Secondary school? Adolescent twats. Primary school? A defecation accident is never far away. And all of them have to put up with the parents blaming them for their thick kids and the government blaming them for being paid. Teachers smile on the outside while inwardly screaming abuse at their knobhead charges.
Cinema workers
Popcorn in the dark makes all the mess you’d expect. They know full well you’re smuggling a bag of M&Ms in your armpit and spill a tub of half-drunk Pepsi over a seat. When they smile and say ‘Enjoy the movie’ they actually mean ‘I’m glad that film sucks, because I f**king despise you’.
Sex workers
Whether stripper or prostitute, just as objectionable as the thought of the sweaty no-neck punter thrusting away at you is the smile you’re required to paste on for them, to make it seem like the whole thing’s a fun lark. Which it definitely isn’t because otherwise the guy wouldn’t be paying for sex.
Your employees
They greet you beaming every morning, laugh at your jokes and invite you to the pub after work. But it’s not real. They only put up with your bellendery through gritted teeth. It’s called survival and ensures that when you’re deciding which poor schmuck to dump the shit jobs on it’s always Terry who smiles insincerely so deserves it.