The Nostalgia Whore Strikes Again

I wrote this a while back, but didn't post.

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Everything at an airline happens by seniority. Your pay and schedule, what airplane and seat you fly, your vacation; all these things, or the choices available to you, are a function of how long you have been on the seniority list.

Seniority advancement has its issues. At my previous jobs--and I'm thinking of driving a city bus specifically--there were instances of people moving up the list who really didn't deserve it. Some people were really shitty employees. One finds less of that kind of thing at an airline, since (I presume) if you're a fuck-up you won't make it past all the hurdles. But even if seniority progression has its issues, I'd take it hands-down over merit advancement, mostly because, in my experience, merit is almost never merit. It's always some bullshit combination of politics and expedience and practical alliance and so on and so forth. Whatever I may think about it, seniority is how we move forward in the airline world. I began my career here as a flight engineer with a crappy schedule and have gradually moved up to a co-pilot's seat with a pretty decent schedule. My pay and vacation increase according to the same schedule everyone else adheres to.

Tonight we were on approach to Louisville, autopilot off, gear down, flaps out, throttles back about half way. We float over the city at midnight, slowing, slowing to our final approach speed: 190, 170, 150, 145, 142 knots until short final. The captain is flying, I'm on radio duty. But it's a beautiful night, and I can't help looking around as the ground gets closer and closer. We pass right near Churchill Downs, where tomorrow the Kentucky Derby will run. Off to the East is a large area mostly devoid of lights, the Cave Hill cemetery and Cherokee Park, both right next to the crash pad apartment I've kept now for about six years. I've walked thru both places, the park and the cemetery, hundreds of times. And in an instant a flood of details of these early years of (what I presume to be) my last job washes over me. Drives over all these streets and roads which are now clearly visible out my window. A restaurant where I've eaten bacon and eggs at three in the morning. A favorite movie theater where my crash pad mates and I have seen a hundred movies on lazy afternoons while we wait for our phones to ring calling us to a flight assignment. I still think of this job as something fairly new and recent in my life, though I'm fast approaching a longer tenure here than at any previous job. History kind of sneaks up on you.

I slept at the crash pad a couple weeks ago for the first time in eight months. Our airplane broke in the middle of the night for two nights in a row, and they couldn't find a spare. So we got stranded in Louisville instead of heading back up to our hotel in Milwaukee. Our work rules provide me with a hotel room in these circumstances, and the first night I stayed at a hotel off in a semi-familiar part of town. I had my crash pad, of course, for which I dutifully send off a rent check every month; but I had no way to get there. Back at the time I was spending a lot of time there I kept a car in the employee parking lot. But that car is in WI now, so I took them up on their hotel offer. The next night, tho, they had trouble finding a room for me at their usual few hotels they use, so I suggested that I had a place to stay if they'd get me a cab to and from. And that's what happened.

That crash pad visit, and tonight's midnight arrival, were little exercises in nostalgia for me, a remembrance of an alignment of planets which is not going to happen in exactly this way again. I think this is why my crash pad mates and I have been reluctant to let our little apartment go. First, it's only a hundred bucks a month, and we're bound to need it at least a week or so every year for recurrent training and the occasional scheduling oddity. But we might do just as well staying in a hotel for these few days. I think it's this sense of shared struggle that has bonded we four original crash pad mates together and to our little hovel. We spent more time together during the first three or four years at this job than we did with our families. And the nature of things with a reserve schedule meant we had a lot of time to goof off together. So we saw a lot of movies and test-drove a lot of cars and read a lot of magazines at Borders and surfed the net a lot at the local library. And we talked an awful lot about our lives and families and this job and our previous jobs. We went to the park and threw a baseball around. Or a frisbee. We rented a whole lot of movies. We bought an X-Box and challenged each other to Halo tournaments.

We met in our new-hire class, five days before 9/11. It turns out that 9/11 was very nearly the death knell of our chosen profession (at least in its recognized state), and we were most vulnerable at the absolute bottom of the seniority list. All of us had left viable jobs to come here, only to wonder, as thousands of our coworkers at other airlines did, whether we were going to keep our jobs. As it turned out, we were among very few new hires who did hang onto our seats. Just barely. (We got furlough notices, but it was canceled three days before we had to turn in our IDs.) And so we spent three and a half years without anyone hired in below us. We were really grateful to have the job, certainly, but it was still a bit trying to be stuck month after month with the worst schedules in the worst positions at the airline. The four of us were bounced from airplane type to airplane type, each move requiring a long and rigorous training regimen, only to sit at the bottom of a different airplane's seniority list.

As the industry slowly turned the corner, hiring resumed and our seniority moved up, slowly at first and then more rapidly. We all got into flying seats, but we went to different equipment. And so that common experience we'd had began to delaminate, and we all spent less and less time at the crash pad. That's all good, right? Ideally we'd be at home the maximum number of days and spend no time at an apartment away from our families. But that advancement meant the end of this thing we had together, a kind of second family forged thru some trying circumstances.

Now we bump into each other only occasionally during the sort at night, and we talk on the phone once a month or so. And my little nostalgic overflight of Louisville tonight reminded me that things which were once bone-marrow familiar were becoming hazy with disuse. We all talk about becoming junior captains in the next few years, and maybe about a resurgence of the crash pad life as we start over again. But we'll almost certainly not upgrade at the same time, nor to the same equipment, and so I'm reminded that these little planetary alignments are kind of one-offs.

After three hours of sitting, we blast off to the North, back to Milwaukee and the ongoing stream of the rest of our lives.