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Flight School Uniforms on Airliners.

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...and starting pay is quite a bit better than FO gigs at regionals...[/quote]

that describes almost every job out there.
 
Ah, this brings back memories!

Back when we were in the internet provider business (and I was much younger and much, much stupider) we had a particular customer who liked to call us whenever he got drunk, which was about every two weeks - it must have been when he got paid. Anyway, he would call the help line completely wasted and ask us things like "where are my car keys?" and "Can you come and give me a ride?"

He had a web page. Every customer got some small amount of web space. We swear he edited the page while drunk too, because it was HIDEOUS. Most of it was flashing text talking about how well endowed he was and how he had to fight the women off with it, wielding it like a club. It had some dumb song playing in the background as a MIDI file, and changed colors like a bad LSD trip, and varied font sizes inside of words. It was BAD.

One day, I happened across his little corner of the internet while doing something or another and was so stunned by this display I decided to go and share it with my favorite USENET newsgroup, the Scary Devil Monastery. It's a public-read secret-write newsgroup for system administrators - Anyone can read it, but to post it you have to Wave a Chicken, the term used to describe forging parts of the posted message. I wrote up a short post, giving the address of the web page and a very unflattering opinion of it and its creator. It generated about 4 pages of responses, all of which were similarly unflattering. They ranged from "That's simply awful!" to "They let this man drive a car?" (Well, they did until this third DUI, but that was to come a few months later...) We all had a good laugh.

What I didn't know was that in addition to being a drunk, the customer in question was a net.kook - He liked to search for his own name in web search engines. At the time there was a new search engine for USENET, Dejanews. I figured that as long as I didn't mention his real name in the message, I was safe, right? WRONG, he searches for his username (part of the web address) too!

He printed my post and the responses and called my boss. He was not pleased. I was forced to apologise in person (he was drunk for the apology and didn't remember it the next day, so I was made to deliver it twice), post a retraction and public apology in SDR (which led to much public ridicule; I left the group in shame), and nearly lost my job. I had to forfeit two weeks of pay and we had to give him two months of free service. It was humbling to remember that even as the senior network administrator, you are worth less to the company than any drunk who can stumble through the door with $10.

As an epilogue, two weeks later the guy called the helpline, completely wasted. He couldn't remember where he was. It was outside some bar. We gave him his caller-ID and wished him good luck, then hung up on him. He had completely forgotten about the incident. (My boss hung it over my head for another year or so, until the internet provider went out of business.) Nine months after the incident the guy was arrested for driving drunk on a revoked license and sent to jail. We closed his account for nonpayment and never heard from him again.

Lesson learned: When flaming customers, post anonymously and through a proxy! (^_^)
 
Speaking of booze, why would anybody want to wear a uniform on an airliner? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the flight attendants will NOT serve booze to uniformed aviation personnel.
 
I've had fun reading it...

Three bars?! I wish they'd let us wear more than a bar or two in the Air Force...

Can't wait to come back in 10 years and fight over who's company sucks worse!
 

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