While he's not Time's Person of the Year, former JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater did own this year's spare 15 minutes of fame. TIME explains: "Fifteen-minute fame is not like the regular kind. The celebrities it creates are sticks in a stream, suddenly aswirl in a dizzying current. When JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater was hit on the head by a passenger's bag in August and had what he describes as the 'hissy fit heard around the world,' ending in a dramatic exit via an emergency chute, he was not expecting to become a folk hero to overworked, stressed-out employees everywhere."

It's unclear if he was even a folk hero for 15 minutes, as the public quickly turned on him; he said of that time: "I've never felt more alone in my life than I did at the height of public scrutiny." Take a look at where Slater is now, and how he got there—in his own words (and someone else's quirky music):