They hand out drinks, demonstrate those emergency evacuation procedures and do their best to make a 14-hour flight comfortable for the 250-odd passengers cooped up in a metal tube . But here’s what your flight attendant is probably thinking behind that broad smile… the 11 things your flight attendant would never tell you:

1. “When you arrive on board, and I welcome you with a smile and a greeting, I’m not speaking a foreign language. Please feel free to return the greeting.”
2. “When you arrive late with hand luggage the size of a small principality, and you leave it in the aisle and ask me in a condescending voice to ‘find somewhere for this’, the answer might not be the polite one you hope for.”
3. “When I offer you the choice of chicken or fish, it’s not funny to ask for steak. I may have heard that joke before.”
4. “We don’t have a boyfriend in every city. And our median age these days is 44.”
5. “If you’re travelling with a small child and you keep hearing bells, please look to see if it’s your child playing with the call bell.”
6. “The lavatory door is not rocket science. Just push.”
7. “It’s not OK to come back into the galley to stretch and bend over with your rear end in my face while I’m in my jump seat during my only break, trying to eat a meal.”
8. “If you have a baby, bring nappies. If you’re diabetic, bring syringes. If you have high blood pressure, don’t forget your medication.”
9. “There are other people on the plane besides you. So don’t clip your toenails, snore with wildabandon, or do any type of personal business under a blanket!”
10. “If you’re travelling overseas, bring a pen. I carry some, but I can’t carry 200.”
11. “Passengers are always coming up to me and tattling on each other. ‘Can you tell him to put his seat up?’ ‘She won’t share the armrest.’ What am I, a preschool teacher?”

Sources: Longtime flight attendants in LA and Auckland; John Safkow, a flight attendantand creator of marthastewardess.com; and flight attendant Betty Thesky, author of Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase.

Article courtesy of Reader’s Digest February 2011.