And Another One

Okay that whole "keep the early morning momentum going" thing didn't work out too well. I don't think they will call back. If they liked me and were as busy as they clearly were, they would have trained an extra captain to get ahead of the curve. I'm back to the mode of no great thing in sight, so why should I do anything now. The place was littered with study materials, abandoned after the news that my new familiarity with the Screaming Whippet wasn't going to help anyone, and their presence wasn't improving my mood any. I wanted to put them in a pile and burn them, along with my licence, but sense prevailed. Besides, hey, free books! I put them away, with a huge pile of other manuals of airplanes I have flown, wished I'd flown, had friends that have flown or just acquired because it seemed cool at the time.

I checked into that whole chicken thing. My municipality has a whole packet of rules about chickens. There isn't enough room to accommodate the chickens here, not with following all the rules about the amount of indoor and outdoor space and the chicken jacuzzis and the distance from all dwellings they have to be. I'm also not allowed to hatch my own chickens, because both baby chicks and male chickens are illegal. The truth is, I probably didn't want to do that much work anyway. Chickens need a lot of looking after. How does anyone ever decide to have children? Chickens are nothing compared to kids, and if you're really fed up with them you can take them to an abattoir and then bring them home for dinner. So that means I'm apparently not properly equipped to care for a chicken. Yet they let me fly. It would be cool if they required you to get a licence and prove that you had the proper amount of space, and gave you a list of the required tasks and how much time they would all take before you were allowed to have children.

So no chickens. Maybe a rat. Do I qualify for a rat licence? It would probably bite me, anyway. Stupid rats.

I think I'll pull some of the more interesting airplane manuals out and make the groundschool thing a regular feature here. I'm going to read airplane manuals and translate them into basic silly English on the blog. But it seems like every time things go well, but the time I post blog entries about them going well, they've gone bad again. So I'm never going to tell you I have a job ever again. I'm just going to post random aircraft systems and make up stories about me flying airplanes. You'll never know if they are true or not. Maybe I've been making this all up all along.

Sigh.

Sad.

Mad.

But warm. I almost gave my old company jacket to charity last week, in anticipation of getting a new one. In that respect, if I were more organized, I'd be cold now.

Another Day

Now I'm feeling madder than yesterday. They aren't going to call me back. I'm in some kind of No Fly database that I can never know about or escape from. Once when I left one job for a better one, the owner of the old company called the manager of the new company to say that I was a terrible pilot and a non-trustworthy employee. Fortunately the new boss already knew me, so realized that the last desperate ploy to stop me getting the new job was actually a compliment about my value as a pilot. Sometimes I picture a vast conspiracy wherein that boss has made it his life's work to sabotage my career, finding out wherever I try to go and poisoning them against me. Hey, some of you thought it was paranoia last week when I had the premonition this job was going to fall apart.

But for now, I'm just fed up. I hate airplanes. They're stupid. I'm going to go buy some chickens and look feed them and collect the eggs. No, I'm going to rent an incubator and buy some fertilized eggs and hatch my own chickens so they imprint on me and I can raise them and train them to fetch, or cluck on command, or not to drown in the rain, or whatever the pinnacle of chicken learning is. And then I'll collect the eggs, and then when the chickens stop laying eggs I will tell them that I have rescinded their job offer, and I will eat them. And yay for the circle of life.

I found a big pile of partially completed to do lists today; I never throw out uncompleted to do lists, it seems, just abandon them half done. And they all seem to have the same things undone, things that always need doing even though I do them fairly often, things that come around again and again. I'm going to do them all. I'm going to go through all my lists and do them until they are done once and for all, and not have any fun because I don't deserve any. Except that feeding my chickens might be fun. I'll let you know.

I turn on my computer to find out where to buy chickens and somehow end up on an aviation job site. I haven't checked it for a week, on account of thinking I had a job. "Hmm, this job looks good." I could raise chickens there instead of here. I start to compose an e-mail to the chief pilot, when the phone rings. It's an ex-chief pilot, in town flying a medevac to here. I go out to dinner with the crew, good to catch up. One of the flight medics observes, "I never knew before this job how difficult it was to be a pilot." I thought she was talking about physical tasks like loading, de-icing, or the hours, but she continues to say, "You can't just decide where you want to work, apply and get a job. You have to work really hard to find a job, and go wherever that job is." She gets it. And it's not just me. It's the industry. I come home and finish the e-mail. And send another to another company. And make a list of more people to contact. Life goes on.

I hate airplanes. At least when chickens shit on you, you can use it to fertilize the garden. I think the worst part is that I know every fricking circuit breaker on this airplane I'll probably never fly. All those brain cells faithfully holding information that I may never use. Who wants me to finish telling you all about the airplane for which I received free groundschool and training manuals, and who wants to skip it and learn about chickens?