In the form of Buddhism I practice, we have a couple of main things we do in terms of our prayers. When I first started thinking about investigating Buddhism, my counselor and dear friend who suggested it to me said “go, give it a shot, learn the chants, do them for a few months, see how it goes.”
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I’m not good at being sick. I’ll freely admit that, right now. I hate it. I hate feeling crappy, I hate having to hit the bathroom every 20 minutes, I hate hate hate being sick.

Yesterday, I was sick. It was really just a mild little flu or cold; my fever only got to about 100 and I didn’t have the uber-violent chills/hot flashes, just low-level chilling. I never actually barfed and I was able to eat twice (some cereal for breakfast and a can of chicken noodle soup for dinner) and hold it down.

One thing about working for the FAA, though, is that you can’t take anything and still go to work. See, any medication that affects the brain, or that *might* affect the brain, disqualifies you for working live traffic. About all you can take is basic pain relievers, like Tylenol, aspirin, ibuprofen, Aleve. You can take Sudafed. That’s about it, really; when it comes to cold medications, you’re kinda screwed.

Now, this isn’t really that unreasonable a restriction; given the stresses and demands of the job, it’s probably not a bad idea.

But it does present problems for us controllers when we’re in a spot like I am today. I’m tired, but feeling much better. My fever is gone and I don’t have that all-over aching like I had yesterday, nor is my nose running or whatever. But I am kinda beat and would like to take a little something as a cold/flu medicine, just as a pick-me-up.

If I take something, though, I can’t go in to work (which I should be leaving for right now). And despite the fact that controllers can’t work while taking all kinds of normal cold/flu medications, we don’t get any more sick leave than typical federal employees. (In fact, the FAA denigrates controllers, suggesting that since we take slightly more sick leave than other, non-medically-restricted FAA job positions, we are somehow “abusing” our sick leave benefits.)

Given my health history over the past few years, which has been a pattern of good health followed by massive problems that knocked me out for long periods at a time, my sick leave balance is a lot lower than I like, or that someone should have.

So I’m left with trying to choose between going to work despite being a bit tired, or burning up some more of my already-too-low sick leave.

I think I’m going to try and split the baby; I’ll go in for a few hours and re-evaluate once I get there. If I’m too beat, I’ll head home for the weekend and snuggle into my nice down comforter in front of the TV.

In April of 2003, on a web discussion board, I wrote about how I thought that Iraq might well be headed for a civil war.

From an article in today’s Seattle Times:

Iraq’s Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.

It’s pretty simple, really. The Kurds have long felt themselves deserving of a separate nation, one of their own, that stretches from portions of Turkey, through Iraq, and into northern Iran. They have two main “political parties” (which are little more than extended family/tribal affiliation groups) that have managed to set aside their differences, agreed to share power (and more or less divvy up the Kurdish regions in Iraq amongst themselves) and work together for their own interests. They did it against Saddam and now they’re doing it against the government that’s being formed in Iraq.

As I’ve said before, the Sunnis are liable to wind up on the short end of the stick in all this, primarily because they don’t really have a lot of oil where they live. Saudi Arabia isn’t going to help them out in a military manner, despite the Saudis being primarily Sunni. The Shiites hate the Sunnis after decades of repression at the hands of Saddam. The Kurds, while Sunni in their religious affiliation, are not Arabic ethnically, so they don’t feel close to the Sunni Arabs.

The real reason we haven’t yanked right out of Iraq isn’t because of “terrorists”. The insurgency, depsite using terrorist tactics, isn’t really an Islamo-terrorist type of thing; while some are motivated by traditional Osama-related terrorist goals, most of the insurgent attacks are actually the opening shots in a Iraqi civil war.

I live in Seattle, for anyone reading this who hasn’t paid attention. (As if I have many readers… yet.) I’m an air traffic controller and have an interest in aviation in general. Seattle’s “hometown” airline is Alaska Airlines.

Alaska Air used to be one of the very best to fly, period. For years they ranked among the very highest in customer satisfaction; traveling magazines gave them high ratings for their onboard food, their on-time performance, and so forth.

Unfortunately, though, this cost moolah. Alaska didn’t have a ton of competition in some of their markets, and man, they made you pay for it. They intentionally lowballed one airline, MarkAir, and ran them out of business in 1995. There’s nothing wrong with healthy competition; whether Alaska undertook any illegal actions or not (MarkAir at one point sued Alaska and settled, getting millions in the settlement) is up for debate.

However, through the 90s, Alaska Airlines started getting some competition, in addition to branching out and growing into other markets. One of their main competitors now, at least in the Seattle market, is Southwest Airlines. Southwest is the ultimate “low cost” airline; they’re tremendously successful and a wonderful example of how a smart, well-run corporation can treat its employees well and still kick butt and take names in business.

In May of 2005, Alaska replaced several hundred unionized ramp workers at Sea-Tac airport with contracted employees from Menzies Aviation. Since then, more flights are late, more bags are lost, and then the other night they had a little incident…

Basically, a ramp guy was driving one of their little conveyer belt truck thingys, and he ran it into the side of an airplane. He didn’t think it was any big deal, so he didn’t say anything to anyone about it. Oops. He ripped enough of a gash that the plane had a weak spot, so at 26,000 feet up or so after it departed, it depressurized. Hard. The depressurization was explosive, in fact, and the oxygen masks popped down. People freaked, of course; some probably thought that a bomb had gone off. An acrid odor, like burning plastic, filled the plane.

(Personally, I would guess that this was from the chemical reaction used to create the oxygen in the masks; I believe that typically they use a set of chemicals that “burn” but put out oxygen as a side effect, which is then sent into the mask system. A bunch of these canisters, being shipped and not in service, are what caught on fire on the ValuJet 592 crash in the Everglades in Florida some years ago.)

The plane returned to Sea-Tac, the passengers got onto another plane (whether they ALL did, or if some said “screw this, I’m taking the train or another airline” is unreported), and of course the media is all over the story.

What I find interesting is that many of the things that the ramp workers predicted, back when Alaska canned them to save money, is coming true.

Sometimes a business loses sight that there’s only so much cutting that can be done to employees, wages and benefits; at times, you’ve just got to do a better job of running the operation itself. The problem isn’t the people; it’s the nitwits running the airline.

They think they’ve saved money by getting rid of their ramp and baggage workers in Seattle, but how much did they lose on this single flight? How much did all the media coverage, complete with pictures from people on board the plane, drag down their reputation? How many people have switched to other airlines over the past year, thanks to Alaska doing a cruddy job for them?

What’s scary, from an air traffic controller’s point of view, is that the FAA- my employer, a safety regulating government organization- has talked a LOT over the past few years about “running more like a business” and “we have to link revenues with outlays” and other such Dilbert-speak. The people we’re hiring, though, aren’t from the Southwest Airlines or Jet Blues of the nation; we’ve got a guy who helped run American Airlines into the ground (Russ Chew) running the Air Traffic Organization, which handles air traffic control; and the guy running our labor relations is a guy who’s suing his last employer (Joseph Miniace) because they didn’t pay him a bonus (because his tenure was an utter failure) he thinks he’s entitled to. Miniace’s last job? Running the employer’s side during the dockworker’s contract negotiations the last time around, where he locked the workers out- and they wound up getting pretty much what they wanted.

Why businesses learn all the wrong lessons sometimes, I don’t know.