The Flight Where My Ego Needed It's Own Seat

I was flying from Los Angeles to Dubai with my brother on Emirates, and before I continue, I need you to understand the version of me who boarded that airplane. I was confident. Not normal confident either. I mean the kind of confidence where you walk onto a fourteen-hour flight, see what looked like a storm of beautiful flight attendants, and instead of wondering what they're serving for dinner, you think, "This could be the greatest flight of my life."

My brother was apparently traveling to Dubai.

I was apparently entering the Olympics.

Back then I had this theory that economy was where Emirates hid all the younger, newer flight attendants, while business and first had the more senior crews. I have absolutely no idea whether this theory had any basis in reality, but at the time I believed it like I'd personally studied Emirates HR records. Either way, I was in economy, I liked what I saw, and before we'd even taken off I had gone into hunting mode.

The first flight attendant who caught my attention was from the UK. Beautiful, funny, friendly. Naturally, I started ordering things I didn't need just so she'd keep coming back. Water. Coffee. Another water. Something else. At some point I was probably one request away from asking whether Emirates had a screwdriver and a medium-sized houseplant.

Eventually she figured out exactly what I was doing. She'd come over smiling with that look that said, "What does this idiot want now?" We kept talking, I kept flirting, she kept entertaining it, and eventually I asked for her number. A little while later she brought me a cup of coffee with her number written on it.

Gentlemen, at that moment you couldn't tell me shit.

I wasn't sitting in economy anymore. I was sitting on the throne of the British Empire.

What made it worse was that I had already watched other guys try flirting with some of the same flight attendants. I saw the smiles, the little jokes, the attempts to keep conversations going. Nothing. These women were professionals. They had probably heard every line imaginable from Los Angeles to Dubai and back. Some of these poor guys were getting shut down so efficiently they barely realized the conversation was over.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting there drinking coffee with a phone number on it.

This was terrible for my ego.

A normal man would have accepted the victory and gone to sleep. Unfortunately, I have never been accused of knowing when to leave well enough alone.

After midnight, dinner was finished, the cabin was dark and most people were sleeping. That's when my brain produced what I considered at the time to be a brilliant idea: the bathroom. Apparently getting her number somewhere over the Atlantic wasn't enough. I now wanted membership in the Mile High Club.

I went to the bathroom, came back out, found her and told her something was wrong inside. She asked what was wrong. I told her, "I can't explain it. You have to see it."

This should have been the moment Emirates opened an emergency exit and threw me into the ocean.

Instead, she followed me.

She stopped at the bathroom door and asked again what was wrong. I told her to come inside. At this point she obviously knew there was absolutely nothing wrong with that bathroom. She looked left, looked right, saw nobody around and stepped inside.

Then she told me, "I can't be in here for more than thirty seconds."

Thirty seconds?

Lady, you have severely overestimated me.

We started kissing. Things escalated quickly. Then I encountered an obstacle nobody had mentioned in the Mile High Club brochure: her uniform.

Skirt. Stockings. Underwear. Layers upon layers of aviation-grade security.

I'm trying to figure out the logistics while the clock is ticking, and suddenly it becomes obvious that successfully completing this operation would require tools, planning permission and possibly a small construction crew.

She started laughing and told me, "This isn't happening."

I looked at her outfit. She looked at me. I looked back at the outfit.

She was right.

I'd need a chainsaw.

She fixed herself, laughed again and walked out, leaving me standing in an Emirates bathroom like a man whose Mile High Club application had just been denied because he failed to bring the required documentation.

I returned to my seat. My brother looked at me. I said nothing.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn't.

Because on a flight that long, crews rotate. A few hours later, another crew appeared, and somewhere inside my deeply malfunctioning brain a voice whispered, "New game."

Another beautiful flight attendant. Another conversation. More flirting. Eventually, another number.

This time I had learned one important lesson: stay away from the bathroom.

Later I caught her during a quiet moment near the curtained galley area. We started kissing and went at it for maybe twenty seconds before she pushed me away, smiling, and told me to go back to my seat.

I walked back like I'd just successfully negotiated an international peace treaty.

My brother had finally had enough.

"What the FUCK is wrong with you?"

I started laughing.

"Relax, bro."

"RELAX? YOU ARE WILD."

By the time we landed in Dubai, I had somehow collected five flight attendants' numbers.

And one passenger's.

Six numbers. One flight. Economy.

And remember, I'd watched other men trying their luck during that same flight. They were throwing out lines, making conversation, trying to get that extra smile. Nothing. Some couldn't get thirty seconds of attention from women I'd been talking to throughout the flight. Every time another guy struck out, my already dangerously inflated ego gained another ten PSI.

By the time the wheels touched down in Dubai, my ego needed its own passport.

I stepped off that aircraft feeling like I'd personally conquered a small country. My brother stepped off looking like he'd spent fourteen hours supervising a dangerous zoo animal.

And the funniest part was what happened inside my head afterward. Instead of thinking, "That was ridiculous. Maybe I should calm down," I thought:

"If I can do this in economy... imagine what I can do in business class."

That thought should have been medically evaluated.

Eventually, I did fly business class.

I'm going to leave what happened on that flight for another story because, frankly, some things are better left anonymous. Let's just say my theory was thoroughly tested.

For years I genuinely believed that first Emirates flight proved I possessed some extraordinary international level of game unavailable to ordinary men. Five flight attendants. One passenger. Los Angeles to Dubai. I was basically the Muhammad Ali of unnecessary flirting.

Looking back now, I'm slightly less convinced.

Maybe I had game. Maybe they thought I was funny. Maybe fourteen hours trapped inside an aluminum tube simply lowered everybody's standards.

I don't know.

What I do know is that while hundreds of perfectly normal passengers were peacefully sleeping underneath their little Emirates blankets, my brother was sitting beside a grown man who had somehow convinced himself that an economy ticket was an all-inclusive singles resort.

And honestly, the real hero of this story was him.

Because he had fourteen hours to smother me with one of those tiny airplane pillows.

And somehow, he showed restraint.