Being back to work, that is.

It means sleeping in a bunk bed in a room with 3 other guys, all of whom snore. It means sitting in a crew room with spotty internet, a macbook on my lap and headphones on my ears. People laugh at me for not wearing ear buds. I’ll wear ear buds when someone finds some that I can wear for 12 hours straight and not tire of.

It means climbing out of the bunk bed only to come nap in a recliner, in a silly costume.

It means waiting around making sure that my phone is set on vibrate if I’ve got headphones on, or set on loud if I’m trying to sleep. A missed phone call is potentially a lost job.

It means navigating around hoards of stupid passengers who congregate wherever I might need to walk. Passengers who think it’s okay to stop and carry on a telephone conversation in the middle of a walkway on an airport concourse. Passengers who think it’s okay to get off an escalator and simply stop. Passengers who stand on the left in moving walkways.

There may have been some glamor to the job once. That was before the days of $49 round trip fares. Back when pilots wore hats and passengers didn’t wear pajamas.

There’s not much left in the way of glamor. That’s okay, I don’t want or need glamor. I really don’t. All I want is to get paid to fly an airplane.

It doesn’t matter much which airplane or where I get paid to fly it to or from.

I still really enjoy the job, when I get to actually do it. Unfortunately, doing the job rarely seems to mean actually flying airplanes. And, for the airlines, when it does, the job is full of absurd things.

When I got the call for the DSM round trip this morning, the flight was scheduled to depart a couple of minutes earlier. I gathered my things and got to the plane. I discovered by flipping through the paperwork that the plane had just come out of a maintenance inspection and that among other things, they’d taken apart the right engine and replaced nozzles and turbine blades or some such. That made me a little nervous. I did a thorough exterior pre-flight inspection, and then got started on the inside. There’s approximately 50 different tests to perform on the first flight of the day. They all involve flipping a switch and looking for something to happen, listening for some noise, or making sure that nothing at all happens. I spent several minutes doing all that. It’s a noisy process, and you might have heard it if you board a plane in the morning. Things you’ll hear a CRJ say if it’s the first flight of the day, “Jet Pipe Overheat, Wing Overheat, Gear Bay Overheat, Glideslope, Terrain, Terrain, Pull Up, T-CAS System Test Okay,” among others. I’m not really sure why I have to make it say all these things. It seems like these systems should be self-monitoring and if they fall, they should let me know. I think for the most part they are, but we run the tests anyway.

The Captain showed up, entered the flight plan into the computer, and then called dispatch to find out about our flight attendant. It turns out that the original one lost her badge, so another one would be sent our way. Why there’s no way to allow a flight crew member to work without a badge is beyond me. You’d think that with all the various forms of proof of ID we carry around, there’d be some other way to establish our identity. The Captain decided he’d go fetch himself some coffee while we were waiting, and that I’d tell them to board when the flight attendant showed up and finished her safety checks.

The catering guy wanted to know if we needed supplies, but since the flight attendant wasn’t there, I kept telling him to come back later. Finally I gave up and investigated the galley myself. It’s set up entirely different from the CRJ-200’s I used to be a flight attendant on, but it seemed like everything that should be there was there except ice. I got some ice, and noticed that there was no water in the aft potable water tank. The aft tank supplies the sink in the lavatory, and so I figured I’d I’d ask for some water. I flipped the switch in the galley on and off to make it run its self-test during which it lights up all the lights, on the off-chance that the lights were burned out but there was actually water back there. None of the lights lit up. That’s when I noticed that the associated circuit breakers were pulled out, collared and there was an MEL sticker next to them. MEL stands for “Minimum Equipment List” which is a giant 3-ring binder we keep in the cockpit with a list of everything that can be broken in the plane and what, if any, restrictions apply. For instance, we have two ice detection systems. If one of them is broken, the MEL says we can still fly. But we have to stick a sticker on the system, and do lots of paperwork. In addition to lots of paperwork, the item has to be fixed in a specified amount of time.

The aft lavatory water being deactivated isn’t a big surprise at all, and I figured it’s probably one of those MEL’s that they can leave for a long time. But something stuck in my head–there were no MEL’s listed in the “trip can” for the airplane, nor were there any listed on the dispatch release. I double-checked. Sure enough, nothing. A couple weeks ago, though, someone had written up the Aft Potable Water system, and maintenance had come out and deactivated the system. But then, several days later, maintenance had signed off this system as working. But the sticker was still there, and the circuit breakers were still collared.

When the captain got back, I pointed it out to him. He called maintenance, and they came out and scratched their heads. They re-activated the system and tried to fill it, and discovered that it didn’t work. So they deactivated it once again and straightened out the paperwork. That all took half an hour.

And that’s what this job means, often: bureaucratic paperwork that is in no way related to the business of flying an airplane.