Upon entering the beautiful, modern & gigantic AA campus, I remarked to my hotel shuttle driver that the property resembled a commune due to the dozens of people wandering around with blank stares on their faces while also looking like their souls had been sucked out of their bodies. I entered the interview building and was shuffled around between nondescript conferences rooms until I ended up in front of two men who looked at my passport & maybe something else, I don’t remember. AA had sent am email telling me to kill some trees & waste some toner by printing a couple previous emails because we don’t all have enough tech on our phones to pull up emails on them. Then we got sent to another bland conference room that thankfully had views of nice landscaping & plants because I needed something to distract me from my thirst and eventual hunger because this multi-billion dollar airline couldn’t even throw a bottle of water & some airplane peanuts at me for the next several hours as I waited to be released out of the Twilight Zone. This is getting long. Here’s a recap: you sit at tables named after airplanes (737, 787, 5732, whatever) with 7-8 candidates & complete a “writing exercise.” Basically, there’s a short story followed by five options and you label the options 1-5 based on how you’d react to the situation then explain yourself in a few sentences why you chose your #1 option. The show finally gets on the road when a guy who looks a game show host starts talking about how special we are to be there. (Yet we, the Chosen Ones, weren’t even allowed a room-temperature bottle of water?) There’s a super boring group activity called Judge the Other Flight Attendant Candidates where you get a large laminated poster board and write fun facts about yourself & your group and everyone else has to guess who the fun fact belongs to. This could’ve been mildly fun had AA not decided to drag the activity out for an hour so the recruiters could observe us like lab rats. I get it. FAs have to work with all sorts of personalities but an hour? It felt like a lame team building exercise at a company retreat I’d refuse to attend because I don’t like doing mindless activities with people I’m never going to see again. Then two different recruiters stop by each table and ask a STAR format question. Our first recruiter had personality. I got the feeling that the second was on the hunt for mildly bland candidates who could be shaped into perfect little carbon copy FAs. I could be wrong because I had checked out by then. Then salvation appeared! The WATER dispenser. I finally met some fun fellow candidates who each had a sense of humor as I stood next to my sweet salvation guzzling cup after cup of water. We were then cut off from out water supply and sat back down at our tables to watch a power point presentation that went something like, “Rah rah AA! We are the best. Blah blah blah.” After that, my misery ended as I was ushered to my second salvation of the day: the airport shuttle. The people running the event called us in four groups. Two groups go on the reach test & one-on-one interview, the other two are given freedom to get out of Texas and a TBNT email. Bottom line: I’m sure AA is a wonderful company to work for if you’re not me. The people who went to the shuttles were the ones who I’d guess would be a little harder to shape into the perfect FA. I think AA prefers bright-eyed candidates who are on the less-experienced side. I’m older & have seen some stuff and the entire experience sent up red flags that I would not be a good fit. My biggest pet peeve of the day: The game show host said this is an opportunity to interview AA and decide if it’s a good fit for us. Except I was never given opportunity to strike up a conversation with any of the recruiters. At another mainline that begins with U, we had a few chances to mingle with recruiters and I took that opportunity to ask them questions & learn more about them as both human beings & potential colleagues. I want to personally meet my potential coworkers and get a few seconds with them to see how we connect. At that interview, I felt comfortable. It was a long day but there was bottles water & airline snacks and I felt like the recruiters were genuinely curious about who we were & actually embraced diversity as much as an airline can. Plus, the group activity was only 10 minutes long AND I didn’t want to run screaming from the building in an attempt to break free at any given moment like I did at AA.