Friday, May 29, 2020

Callout Fee


The following is an e-mail I sent to accounting, with only the obvious redactions:
At Mustelid Falls the last couple of weeks we have been buying fuel at a place that officially closes at 6 p.m. but we kept getting the fueller to stay late or come back and fuel us later.  There was no formal callout  procedure, so she didn’t have a way to add a fee to the fuel bill, so I gave her some cash, the cheapest callout fee ever, really, less than $10 a day but it made the difference between treating someone badly and having them feel respected.
This is only about the third sketchiest receipt I’ve ever submitted at Our Company, and it probably allowed us to bill several more hours to Customer Company than we would otherwise, so well worth it.

You’ll see the expense form on your desk.
Said expense form was accompanied by a receipt handwritten by me with a sharpie, on the back of a company form, and signed by the long-suffering fueller, on top of the pumps. She was a maintenance apprentice who hadn't known that her job was going to involve fuelling airplanes.  When I found out that she wasn't getting paid any extra for it, I peeled off some twenties. This was all in the before-times, pre-COVID-19. I found the e-mail while looking for something else, and decided to share it with you.

The sketchiest ever was either a fuel receipt for over $800 cash, written on a Super-8 scratchpad by the third-in-command of the local flying club, or any of a number totally formal government liquor store receipts for cases of beer that the accountant has to take my word for that I've exchanged for goods or services.

6 comments:

mark.medic said...

Hopefully the powers that be didn't have any issue with your reimbursement requests....no matter how unorthodox they might have seemed.

I think we're on a roll here - please keep up the blogging

Benjamin said...

Thanks for beeing alive again... :-)

Greetings from Germany!

Sue said...

Glad to have this confirmation that you're doing okay. I don't think any of us, way back in January (!), had any insight into what was in store for us. I would say that "2020" is a misnomer.

Sarah said...

As an employee-for-now of a huge corporation ... I am envious of simply being trusted to do the right thing. This is how companies should be run. It would save so much time.

Sketchiest ever receipts! Hilarious ... the cases of beer unit of payment must be a Canadian thing.

Todd said...

I just wanted to say I have followed your blog for years and keep up the good work! I used to work in the airline industry, but traded it for more financial security working for The Man. That doesn't mean that I don't miss reading about the everyday adventures and ingenuity that is required in working in your gig. My wife probably thinks that I am creepy in following a lot of female pilots on Instagram but I do it because it allow me to live vicariously thru them to all of the beautiful and unique places that they get to visit. Thank you for allowing me to look thru your window of the world.

Majroj said...

A mission commander in my Air Guard unit had to refuel 2 Sikorsky Jolly Green Giant rescue helos in Mexico. The POL guy wouldn't accept the usual Mexican federal letter of credit, but saw the colonel's Shell gasoline card and used that. He cleared it with Shell the next day, the squadron paid for it, and he framed the bill for his office wall.