Any industry that has to deal with the "General Public" is a tough industry to work in.
Service industries are not easy.
I worked my way through college in retail dealing with hordes of people with thousands of different personalities, demands, and attitudes.
After a while, I became jaded. I started to see most people as demanding, self-centered humanoids that wanted to vent on the poor schmuck in the store.
There seems to be an underlying tone of "The Customer is ALWAYS Right" no matter if the customer has spent 29 cents for a pack of chewing gum, or 299 dollars for an airline flight. Some customers will want preferential treatment for that, and demand high expectations and servitude from those they deem "should deliver" on the payment that was made.
Flight Attendants have to deal with all sorts of weird personalities. Not everyone is well dressed, upscale, and level-headed. Not everyone is rational. I once witnessed a passenger go off on a flight attendant because he asked the man to pull down his window shade for a movie. The passenger demanded his name, and stated he would "Have his job" when he got done with him. If you deal with that nonsense for a few years, you are going to lose faith sooner or later in human common decency and begin to see your passengers as a pain in the behind. And you may get "numb" to a human interaction. This may come off as "hating" the passengers, but IMO, it's simply a human response to being treated harshly by passengers over time. Surely, some may have brought attitudes into the job with them, but for the most part, humans tend to become products of their environment. Being crammed into a small aluminum tube for thousands of hours a year dealing with the general public is not exactly a relaxing job.
I'd probably last two weeks (and I'm being generous with my estimation) if I had to be a FA. Dealing with the general public is very difficult.
I usually just smile at FAs and do what they ask of me. And I rarely ask anything of them. I hope I never have to ask them to help me in an emergency. If I do, I'll be glad they are there for me.
