Noooooo!!!!


by Berck

I just found out I’m going back to ground school. It’s like I’ve been told to repeat the 10th grade.

I’m not really sure I know what’s going on. What I do know is that last week I got an email that consisted entirely of an Excel attachment. I get one of these every week or so, and I open it to see if my name is in it, and it never is. Until last week, when the spreadsheet included these lines:

37395 Nachzen,Berck E 1488 F8 JFK CRJ FO YV IAD CRJ FO 2/11/08

The sum total of the information in there is that I am being transferred from Dulles (IAD) to JFK, and in so doing, would be transferring from Mesa Airlines (YV) to Freedom Airlines (F8). The distinction is technical and appellatory–I’m still working for Mesa Air Group. Assuming that I make it out to JFK as a pilot, I’ll be flying under Delta colors instead of United like I would from IAD. To further muddy the waters, ORD is at the top of my standing bid list, which for all I know, means I could get transferred to Chicago before I’m done with this ground school. The real kicker is that bit on the end there. “2/11/08”. The title of that column is, “Class Date,” and I sent an email Thursday both to the person who sent out this email as well as to the pilot training scheduler to ask if that meant I would actually have to be somewhere on that date. The reason I figured it didn’t really apply to me is that 75% of the folks with that class date on the email are already out there on the line, working in another airplane or in another base.

No one responded, and so I called the person who sent the email this morning. She answered that I would, in fact, be going to class that day. Finally, about an hour ago, I got an email that announced some more specifics of the training. It’ll be in Phoenix (well, actually just south of Phoenix). Since I was there last, Mesa has moved their training operations to, well, Mesa, AZ. The only other real information in the post was what I needed to bring to the training (everything), what I needed to wear (business casual), and when it started, 8am. Lodging information is still TBA. No indication of anything else.

So I responded, asking how long the class is. The answer?

3 weeks.

As far as I can tell, I’ll be going through a complete CRJ systems class… again. In some ways, this isn’t bad, since I’m having a hard time remembering everything I knew the first time around. In other ways, I’ve just been told to repeat a grade, because it’s been too long since I passed it.

3 weeks in Arizona, again. I want to go bang my head against a wall. I’ve been there, done that.

Fortunately, 3 weeks is better than 4. And, it makes me more likely to actually get through and out flying.

Oddly, only 3 other people from my class are listed on the documents concerning this class. It appears to only be those of us who have JFK listed on our bid sheets higher than IAD. The other 12 folks in the class appear to be current Mesa or Air Midwest pilots, who are transferring. So, it’s better than a total new-hire class, but it’s still insane that it’s going to be 3 weeks.

Initial thoughts are that it’s good that I’ll get a forced refresher. I suspect I won’t have a roommate. Also, Jonah has travel benefits and can come visit me on the weekends. I think I’ll drive down there this time. Maybe we’ll drive down together and she’ll fly back.

In any case… sheesh.

Posted in Bloggishness, Nonclassified Nonsense | 1 Comment

Crazy Christians are, in fact, crazy.


by Berck

When it comes out that the Christian leader of the fight against gay rights has bought gay sex from a gay prostitute (as well as some crystal meth while he was at it) I’m not at all surprised.

Similarly, this nugget is just too grand for me to let it escape unmentioned: There’s a Utah-based company, Clean Flix, that edits and resells Hollywood films after removing all the sex, nudity, violence, and “bad” words. So why am I not surprised that the company’s owner was just arrested for sexual abuse and statutory rape? Also, it seems that the owner also told the girls that Clean Flix was merely a front for a porn studio!

This is not an uncommon pattern. Crazy Christian seeks to restrict or eliminate something which he views as deviant behavior (or likely to lead to deviant behavior), only to have it come out that he himself engages in this very same behavior. One could argue that they want to prevent others from becoming similarly deviant, but I think it far more likely that the restrictive culture tends to cultivate deviants. I don’t mean to necessarily indict Christianity specifically, as I’m sure any ultra-conservative restrictive culture has the same problem, but it seems to be more prevalent in Christianity. This is, perhaps, a result of the “ask and you shall be forgiven” nature of Christianity which leads to the belief that the sin is okay because “We’re all sinners, but we’re going to heaven anyway!”

I just wish we (as a society) could focus more on our real problems, rather than the perceived ones. Why can’t evangelical mega churches be leading the fight against poverty instead of spending so much time, money and effort condemning the gays and converting foreign heathens? Sure, there are plenty of churches doing plenty of good, but no good comes out of breeding intolerance– especially not for themselves.

Posted in Nonclassified Nonsense | 15 Comments

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair


by Jonah

In the morning we got up and out in time to make it to a restaurant that serves Dim Sum on Sunday mornings as they opened. I’ve never had Dim Sum, and I can now say that I love it. Chinese women circled the restaurant carrying trays of little covered baskets with food inside. They would tell us what delicacies they held, but of course we couldn’t understand what they were saying in their heavily accented English. So they would open up a basket to display their wares, and we would guess whether it would be tasty or not. We ate all sorts of dumplings some dinner rolls that actually were stuffed with minced meat, a green vegetable that looked like a weed and tasted like grass but came with a yummy thick, sticky brown sauce to dip it in, squares of slightly sweet paste with small chunks of meat in it, a plate overflowing with calamari, green beans in a delicious sauce, and other things. I wanted to try to the chicken feet, but I would have had to have eaten the whole basket myself. We ate and ate and then were sorry we couldn’t sample some things because we already had too much on the table. Fortunately, almost everything came in threes, so there was one for each of us. There was also hot sauce and some mustard with amazing sinus clearing properties. Forks were nowhere to be seen, but we managed just fine except for the slippery round green vegetable that I just ate with my fingers.

Afterward, after having only a pot of tea to share to drink, we stopped at a gas station to fill up Dave’s car with insanely expensive Californian gas and grab some Cokes. Then it was on to “SF” with the top down to the SFMOMA. It has a very nice collection. Some of my favorites were a portrait of Truman Capote by Irving Penn, a guy who creates huge backlit photos of staged scenes, basically carefully creating a realistic painting but without the paint, and a Japanese lady who creates “class photos” where she plays all of the students and the teacher by shooting herself in different hairdos, uniform arrangements, and expressions. There was also a good assemblage of canonical modern art from Matisse to O’Keeffe to Rothko to Warhol, even one of Duchamp’s many Fountains. As usual, I had to wait for Berck to finish, so I deposited myself in front of one of the video displays, an interesting one showing adolescents outside a club, instructed to be in front of a camera for several minutes at a time, a study in the uneasiness of the space between childhood and adulthood.

When we had exhausted the exhibits, we went to the Exploratorium, a huge science museum packed with kids mashing the buttons on all of the interactive displays. Still, there were more exhibits than kids, so there was always something interesting to see. My favorite was the heart beating in the fertilized chicken egg. I’ll have to dig out a magnifying glass next time I bake.

We had to leave before too long to make it to our last restaurant, the famous San Tung 2. (I don’t think #1 exists.) I’d discovered this place on a Google search for “crack chicken.” The wet dry-fried chicken wings were indeed good, think General Tso’s wings, but weren’t what I’d call addictive. The hot and sour soup was crammed with solids including “tree fungus” that tasted good but was the consistency of what the fungus you see on trees is what you’d imagine is like. The noodles with black bean sauce were only good after adding soy and hot sauce. But the fried dumplings… those were delicious, even if they didn’t give us any dumpling sauce. Again we were not offered forks but were given a pot of tea.

We ate hurriedly and left to make sure we got to the airport in plenty of time. Security didn’t take any time at all, and then we checked the monitors. Our plane was an hour and a half late arriving. We had a couple beers and found a quiet corner of the airport with a power outlet to finish watching the movie we’d started on the way in, then began another. We didn’t get off the ground until 9. We finally got home at 1:30 am. I drank a lot of tea the next day at work to stay awake. Last night we went to bed at 8. I didn’t wake up until my alarm went off at 7.

There are pictures, but Berck is controlling them. So you’ll have to ask him if you want to see any.

Posted in Wanderings | No Comments