Monday night I hop on an Icelandair 757 to Amsterdam for a work trip that will last for 17 days. My co-worker Mark has been there being the technical rep for 2 of our aircraft since the end of April so he needs to get back stateside to unwind and bleed some Dutch out of his system.
Needless to say I'm a little bit anxious about the deal. I haven't been away from my wife and kids for such a long period of time bit all things considered it's not too bad. It's not like I'm humping a rucksack up a hill in Afganistan or anything, but still, time away is time away.
I'm overpacked and waiting to take another step out of a comfort zone. On the flip side I'm going to drink my fill of opportunity and see where this path decides to take me. As I wrote in previous entry, this industry is suddenly in unchartered waters. When I last wrote a barrel of crude was going for $110/barrel.
When I left work yesterday it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $139/barrel.
In the middle of April we were just getting set to send the rest of the leased aircraft back home and send ours. That went fine. It was stressful but we got it done. Then from out of the blue they wanted us to bring on an ex-Aloha airlines -700 on line as soon as frickin' possible. We gangbanged that aircraft and had it on the certificate in a hair under 3 weeks.
On the first day of revenue service for that airplane I took a 10% pay cut.
Am I bitter? A little.
Am I defeated? Not even close.
So what does this all mean as I head to Amsterdam? I guess I'm not sure. I'll do the job and take the days and nights as they come. I may even stop and smell the tuplips.
If anyone has any hints of what to do in Amstelveen please let me know.
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