Accompanied Minors

The situation: 2 UMs. Kids from hell: girl-5, boy-7, sister & brother. They clearly hate each other and are literally birthed by Satan.

UMs (unaccompanied minors) can be tricky. I don't know why flight attendants are innately trusted to act as babysitters. We receive no specific training of the kind and I'm personally super awkward around most kids unless they are infantile and I can thus pet their perfectly fine baby hair and coochie-coo them for the 10 seconds it takes for me to want to give them back to their birth vessel.

So check it - Grandma drops off the kids for the flight. Checks them in as UMs. They arrive on our plane. We brief them. We hate them. We throw snacks and soda and run away from them.

The flight takes off. Kids are immediately dinging call lights. HE'S TOUCHING ME! SHE'S TOUCHING MEEE! HE TOOK MY CHIPS! SHE SPILLED MY DRINK! I think about what I want to do to temper this situation but then I think to myself that I cannot go to jail right now. It's not a good time for me.

Passengers around these little toxins are becoming frustrated. One speaks up and makes us aware of the most fucked up situation ever.  She thinks she saw their parents in the boarding area having a little pow-wow with grandmama, the getaway accomplice....BUT also that those sly SOB parents are ON the plane as we speak. They're towards the back drinking Sutter Home merlot as if it were a beaujolais nouveau.

So basically, these dilusional 'parents of the year' paid the modest UM fee, had grandma drop them off as if they were traveling alone so that we, the lucky flight attendants, could babysit their freakishly unbehaved aliens during the flight while they sat in the back pretending not to know their own kind. Sick.

I gotta hand it to them for thinking outside the box, it was quite the clever scheme if it would've worked out...but c'mon. Sack up and parent your children as hard as I can imagine it to be. I have the luxury to imagine because I didn't make the choice to mash 'n smash irresponsibly only to ask Maury who the father was, & more than once.