When the Lufthansa flight was finally ready to depart from Frankfurt after a three-hour delay to fix a malfunctioning part, one of the passengers was missing. Airline personnel finally found him in the airport lounge where had enjoyed one drink too many. The purser tried to calm a surly crowd by assuring us that takeoff would be within minutes.

While the flight was airborne, I talked with the purser about the stresses of her job. Her name was Ingrid and I’ll never forget the wisdom she shared .

“I’ve been with the airline for 18 years,” she said. “ I fly 12 days out of 30, I love my job, the pay is good and my family is healthy. The rest is entertainment.”

I had never thought about it that way before. If I were faced with hundreds of grumbling, jet lagged people demanding information and telling me how rotten my employer is, I don’t know if I would have kept my cool the way she did.

Since that trip, I’ve shared what Ingrid said with my friends. I try to apply it to my own life. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between “Does this really matter? Or is it entertainment?”

I think there’s another question that helps round it out. Will I care about this next week? If not, it’s entertainment. That covers a lot of daily stress generated by annoying people and situations like phone trees, tailgating drivers, empty ATM machines, an ant attack in the cupboards or even thawed freezer food from a power outage.

Some frustrations are more serious and fall into both categories. Like wrinkles, or the President. Both continue to bother me on a daily basis and I haven’t been able to separate the entertainment part from the part that really matters. The saving grace is that one of these frustrations isn’t forever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 10:40 am. Visit the archives for all blog posts.