Why did I get a salad to go with my Boca Burger at Denny's? The lettuce is always dry as popcorn fart, giving away the obvious fact that it was grown months ago and distributed in plastic bags from some sketchy Denny's central salad facility. And the dressing! The "I-talian" has some inexplicable consistency not far from Vaseline. Yet I was content to eat it, because it fulfilled the culinary requirements of the dot com implosion. No more winking at Clea Duvall as one would savor salmon wasabi eggrolls at the Slanted Door on a reservation obtained months earlier. Yes after a few hours of digesting those rock hard tomatoes I would ride in a shuttle across suburban Los Angeles and begin my last day as a United Airlines Flight Attendant. From Ontario airport we would call on Denver and Dallas, and then finally drop in across the Bay. I would sign out, turn in my wings, file for unemployment, and become another statistic.

Of course statistics are nothing new to working people in San Francisco. We read about the economic miracle in the Chronicle every day it snowballed. Yet we knew something in the numbers didn't add up. We knew we really could see hipster stars and 20 year old millionaires munching on fusion food in the Mission, but we also knew we were most likely to catch glimpses of them as we walked past the restaurants on the way back from Taqueria Cancun, burrito in hand. We knew something fishy existed in the sense of self-righteousness that wafted through the city at every moment, and almost expected the new statistics that the economic blast furnace was cooling. And then overnight most of it disappeared, leaving virtually no trace, other than new economic difficulties in a city that has always seen most of its citizens struggling to get by.

But the vignettes from the boom will stay with us. Oh the flights I worked in those days! The sense of entitlement from the new elite left every service worker in a Rumsfeldian state of shock and awe.

"Get me a new seat. I am not sitting next to this fat woman!" the hipster exec railed in front of the pudgy gal who was quickly descending into tears. "I see that open seat in first class. Put me up there! I am not going to sit wedged in here like a sardine."

The woman wailed. The guy couldn't have been over thirty. I considered offering to let him race around the airplane in his little razor scooter to see if that would quell some of his aggression issues. Maybe some nerf basketball on the jetway would help calm him down. Yet United is an old economy operation, and we don't change departure times for young millionaires having temper tantrums. So I took the woman's things and quickly escorted her up to first class, leaving the hot young exec to enjoy the salami sandwich and Fritos for dinner in coach. I told her to wave back at him with her Champaign flute during the dinner service.

In April of 2001 I was working the Washington DC nonstop. Every trip I got stuck working in business class. Most of the passengers were dot commers heading to D.C. to try to change tax laws so they could shelter their millions more easily. Walking down the aisles I often felt like at 25 I was the oldest person in the business class cabin. I remember pouring this executive boy person a glass of Champaign. I really felt like I should card him. I mean it sounded like his voice had just changed. But I saw Cisco Systems logos all over his bags and laptop. I thought maybe he would show some respect to his elder until his reedy voice cracked, "You could at least show us the courtesy of a decent Champaign. This Bouvet is just another inconvenience of this miserable experience at United. Times have changed. Haven't you figured it out!?"

This satanic little voice was coming out of this lobster-tail eating Champaign drinking child. I was looking out the window and we were seven miles above the continental divide just below the speed of sound. We were ahead of schedule. He had a headrest and a footrest and a 9-channel TV in his seat. He got to check in at a special desk with fresh flowers and free magazines and newspapers. Where was the misery? Where were the inconveniences?

Of course not all of us refined our champagne tastes during the boom. United never had any hip parties for Flight Attendants and ticket agents and reservations operators who waited on all those dot com partygoers. United never hired REM to play at a Flight Attendant cocktail party. I never danced in foam or drank single malt on United's dole. In fact I never even got a raise during the boom. Flight Attendant pay was governed by our contract that was signed before the peak of the boom in 1996. We only saw a 2% raise every other year. I never made over 25,000 dollars per year. When Union leaders approached the company to demand special negotiations for higher wages due to the high cost of living, United said we should be happy to have a job with good benefits. I wondered how free flights would pay for a 2000 dollar a month one bedroom.

On all nighter to Boston one evening I got in a conversation with a dot com girl about rents in the city as I refilled her Champaign in the first class galley.

"Yeah my boyfriend and I both make six figures and we fully can't afford a place. Oh my God."

I told her that rent control was the only secret I knew. There were several airline crew crash pads in the city that had four or five people sharing a one bedroom with rent control in an effort to make ends meet on our no-so-booming salaries.

"Oh I don't agree with that. Rent control is destroying the free market. If landlords own a building, they should be able to charge what they want. That's why my boyfriend and I can't find anything. People with rent control never move. If they got rid of rent control people would have to move more often and there would be more choices."

She seemed surprised when I told her a lot of people didn't have double-six-figure incomes to make "more choices" a realistic prospect. I gave her more warm almonds and she excused herself back to her seat.

The rent control girl, the Champaign boy, and the fat-woman-hating executive have probably all left San Francisco today. With them have gone the endless barstool ditherings about stocks, the uninvited vapid conversations about investing at parties, and the endless unavailability of cabs, apartments, and seats in restaurants. The hurricane seems to have passed over, and locals may be beginning to dig out. Yet with them went my job. And with them went thousands of other service, retail, and administrative jobs for ordinary San Franciscans. Many people are left again wondering how they will make rent next month, even if the total owed is lower than two years ago.

I was wincing as I tried to chew through a soggy red onion bathed in gelatinous I-talian dressing. I distracted myself by wondering what I would do on my first day of many days off. Would I get one of Richard's whopping Jack and Cokes at the Phone Booth? Would I eat a burrito in Dolores Park? Would I sit around and drink coffee and talk on the phone? Certainly no single malts in the audience of a private Dave Matthews show awaited me. Yet like most people in San Francisco, they never had.

I thanked the waitress, settled up my tab, headed back to the hotel, and prepared to join the living epitaph of another delusion of our fair city.