One of The Passengers Stole My iPad

Let’s say you’re a flight attendant on Spirit Airlines. You’re boarding passengers on your five-hour cross country flight. You had stowed your own personal gear in the overhead been in the first few rows. Before too many people get on, you go to check on your stuff, and you discover something quite disconcerting:

Someone stole your iPad.

I was on a flight recently where this happened. It was a first for me. I mean, I’ve left things on the plane before, but I’ve never heard one of the flight attendants come on the P.A. and say, in effect:

“Return my iPad now. We’re not taking off until you do so.”

Side note: can a flight attendant just decide that? In this case, apparently not, because we finally did take off. And the iPad remained missing.

You could tell at the beginning of this episode that the flight attendant was pissed off.  Wouldn’t you be? I know I would.

But to this flight attendant’s credit, he rallied after take-off. Despite the fact that he was 30,000 feet in the air with a certain felon. In fact, he probably had to serve them. I would imagine it actually felt good to charge people $5 for coffee and $5 for water, knowing that one of them was unconfessed iPad thief.

I don’t know if I could’ve just changed my attitude like that. I mean, I would have to have done that. But I imagine it wouldn’t be easy to just shift from “I was violated!” to “Would you like anything with your coffee?”

This is a good lesson. Sometimes in life, our iPad gets stolen. That sucks. But what comes next is our response. We can choose to be angry for 5 hours. Or we can make the best of it and know that, at the end of the day, you can send the police to the location shown when “Find My Device” gets activated.

That knowledge would likely put a smile on my face as I did my job. Though you can best believe that if I EVER fly Spirit again, I’ll keep a close eye on my iPad.