Pilot Prejudice

Kansas City

I’m not normally prejudice. As a rule, I treat everybody as equal as possible and though in reality it never happens, I try to have identical expectations from everyone I meet (even gingers). However, there is one arena where I recently found I do have a little prejudice and I don’t think I’m alone. It happened when boarding a flight from Phoenix to St. Louis. When I passed by the cockpit (or the flight deck, as they instructed us to call it at Boeing) I glanced at the pilot and I actually flinched when I saw how young he was. He must have been in his late twenties, but looked to be about 19. He had peach fuzz on his chin and I’m sure he must have just graduated college where at his frat he was probably named after some large saltwater fish. I feel like I’m a pretty good flyer. I’ve flown in and out of some small airports on desolate peaks in developing countries with airlines of dubious record, but this dude made me feel nervous before we even took off. He had this high-pitched voice that would’ve been more appropriate offering a bong, than reading flight coordinates.

So yes, I’m ageist when it comes to my airplane pilots. I want my pilot to be if not old, at least properly grizzled. He should have a limp or even a false leg preferably from being shot down over Hanoi. Nothing’s going to faze this guy. I want him to have a gravelly voice with slow soothing grunts. If, for example, we lose the right wing, I want him to be able to come on over the speaker and say in that voice, “Ahhhh, well folks… it looks like we might have lost our starboard flipper there… but ahhh, you shouldn’t worry too much. We were only planning on… ahhhh turning left from here on out anyway. We should be on the ground in about oohhhh… 27 minutes or so. So folks just sit back and enjoy the extended view from the right.”

And just so you don’t think I’m sexist as well, I’m perfectly fine with women pilots, I just happen to be talking about male pilots at the moment. Strangely enough, now that I’m thinking about it, I want my female pilots to be younger, prim, no-nonsense women with a healthy belief in God. I don’t know why.

What I learned today: If you lose your cel phone charger, ask a hotel. They more than likely will have a huge basket of them and they’ll give you one

Big Country

On a plane between Oklahoma City and Minneapolis

Well… I’ll tell you one thing: this job is giving me an opportunity to visit cities I would never choose to go to on my own. For example, I’ve just left Oklahoma City. Yessirree, I sure did, I tell you what. I must say that, for the most part, I’ve been fairly impressed with the hotels BER uses. In Tulsa we stayed in a beautiful Crown Plaza and I’m on my way to Minneapolis where I think we’re staying in a Marriot. However, last night we stayed in a Clarion… in Oklahoma City. The carpets were stained with what I could only assume to be chaw juice and the lobby/buffet area smelled like cheese zombie. The one thing I will say is that it seems the smaller and the crappier hotel, the better service we get in our conference room. Last week, I stayed at a lovely Hilton on Long Island but the hotel people couldn’t give two shits about our little seminar because there were six other 'conferences' going on, while today the people over at the “convention center” (and yes it was an effort to refrain from using my fingers to parenthesize every time I used this overly-ambitious term today) fell all over themselves helping us out.


One thing that I’ve forgotten about the South or maybe it's a new thing, is one of the ways they have of saying thank you. Rather than saying thank you or I appreciate it, like us ho-hum northerners, some our Southern friends say “I appreciate you.” Now this isn’t after giving them relationship advice or talking them off a ledge, but after everyday activities like making a bank transaction or buying a sandwich. I first heard this in Columbia, South Carolina but then recently heard it again today in Oklahoma City. However, I must admit, it meant more the first time because the SC woman’s accent oozed so much that the word 'appreciate', actually dripped into the word 'you', giving 'you' like 5 syllables, which somehow gave it even more significance. Y-oo-ooo-uuu. Meanwhile, the OK guy’s “I appreciate ya” felt like somebody hurling dry toast at my forehead. Still, it’s nice to know that he appreciated not only my sandwich buying capabilities, but ME.


What I learned today: There are an inordinate number of male teachers named Todd.

Hallow-hilarity

Tulsa, OK

I am so glad that Halloween fell on a Saturday this year and I was able to be home, rather than stuck in

Martha as Beyonce, myself and Adam the beet

some Podunk town like I am right now (my apologies to anybody reading from Oklahoma… oh yeah, I DON’T KNOW ANYBODY HERE). Anyway, it was good fun. I had been hearing about the Sisheimer’s Halloween parties ever since I got hooked up with the Mastatal crowd. I was doubly excited because I came up with (in my mind anyway) a good costume idea. I found a grey onesy on the internet, sewed (yes that’s right, I sewed) on paper claws, ears and a tail put together from the ripped-off limbs of a stuffed monkey. Finally, I made a crown out of yellow poster board to finish off my Max from Where The Wild Things Are costume. It would’ve been a lot cooler had I thought of it before the movie came out, but it was still fun. Nate, my roommate, went as Dr. Simon Funke from the show Arrested Development and with the horseshoe hair, mustache and never-nude cut-offs looked just like him. Awesome. Sparky and Dickie (his friend from Sacremento) both painted cardboard boxes and glued on computer parts and went as robots.

The party itself was mainly held in the Sisheimer’s back yard and basement. For the first time I can remember, it was a clear nice evening for Halloween. When we got to the party, I was shocked to find somebody had actually made a very convincing Where The Wild Things Are monster outfit, which made for some fun pictures.

My favorite costume of the night was worn by my friend Adam. He came over to Casi Casa before the party to hang out with us and he was dressed in a lame drunk Airplane Pilot outfit, which basically meant his Pilot’s shirt was half-untucked, but whatever, I’ve definitely had some lazy-ass Halloween costumes. But later at the party it got worse, because we were chatting to a couple of girls and he was going on and on about how he wasn’t just a pilot, but some Russian pilot who got drunk before flying and the girls had no idea what he was talking about and I kept nudging him and saying under my breath, “Dude, shut-up. Nobody wants to hear the story about the Russian pilot.” But he just kept going until the girls excused themselves and I said, “Couldn’t you at least be the Northwest pilots who fell asleep? You know, a little more current.” He just smiled. Little did I know, the pilot costume was only a decoy. Later, all of a sudden, out comes this dude wearing a giant papier-mâché beet that covered his entire body from the waist up to about 3 feet over his head with no arm holes and whatdoyouknow it was Adam It was hilarious because it was so random. Who goes to a costume party in a lame decoy costume?

It was a great night, but not so fun waking up to go to the airport the next morning. By the way, you can view photos from the night at my facebook page.

What I learned today: They’ve done amazing things in the whiteout business since I was in school… AMAZING THINGS!