Things are gunna change.....

Once upon a time on a rowdy drunken rugby trip to middle of nowhere Iowa, there was a speech given on the bus by the man, the myth and the Legend, Mr. Paul "Hollywood" Green. Hollywood had earned his nickname from his hard nosed rugby and his brutal tackling. Well, maby not very hard nosed (he didn't like to get dirty), and I don't remember him ever making a tackle, but that's besides the point. But the one great thing about him that made him useful to the team was his ability to tell a good story and give a good laugh to all that surrounded him. On this particular bus trip, we had just lost a close game to our division rival. We spent the night in Des Moine and drowned our sorrows at the local bars. The next morning we had to take the long ride back to Milwaukee. It was on this ride that Hollywood gave his famed "Things are gunna change" speech. I don't remember too many specifics of the speech, just some of the finer points, but the punch line was "things are gunna change". It had the bus rolling with laughter. I believe my partner in crime Sands even had beer come flying out of his nose because he was laughing so hard. From then on, "things are gunna change" became Hollywood's mantra. I thought about it the other night when I was thinking about my current situation with my company. Thankfully things have started to change.

For the first time in a long, long time, positive things have started coming from the company. The first of the positive things came in the form of a decent pay raise and bonus for all pilots. I think this was very needed because pilot morale had hit bottom. The most popular thing to talk about amongst ourselves was what jobs we were looking at. Nobody liked our current schedule and the company basically told us we could take our complaints and shove em. Everybody wanted to leave. We even had guys that had been with the company for a long time, quit to take less paying jobs. So the pay raise took a little bit of the edge off our unhappiness, but didn't really satisfy our main complaint of the schedule. So finally after 7 months of a brutal 5 on 2 off, 12 on 2 off schedule, we got our much needed schedule change. We now have a bid system in place so we can bid for lines that we want and we will now all have 10-11 days off a month instead of just 6. Personally, I'm optimistic that its going to work out well. Gone are the brutal 12 and 2's and in comes more time at home!!

On another note, I'm back at our base in the south for my annual re-current training. Its time to hit the books and brush up on things I haven't looked at in quite a while. I was mildly disappointed to find out that we only get a checkride in the sim and not several sim sessions, but I'm over it. It looks like I'll be done early Friday morning and hopefully will be home early that same afternoon. I'll post more about re-current at a later time.