Wow. I'm pretty surprised that this thread is still active and that anybody remembered it at all. It's been a pretty hard week personally for me, and I admit it really cheered me up to see that somebody responded to this one all over again.
I've been at Chautauqua since October of 2002, as has been mentioned. I just finished my PC check last week and am officially off probation right now. I fly out of CMH (as many who know who I am already know), and have flown reserve, sweated my first furlough (though I made it), been through a contract, and now enjoy pretty good FO seniority because of our growth.
I was thinking about this story I told originally last year about a rather bad night in the cargo business. Like a lot of us who have been through it, and a lot of people who are still doing it and have done it longer than I did, there are times when I really wondered why I'd entered into this business. At the time I wrote that story, I was sleeping on a friend's couch because I couldn't afford a place to live, I was in debt up to my eyeballs, and I had just been dumped by a woman I was dating. I had nearly been offered my dream job about five months prior working for a great corporation, but they decided instead to offer it to someone with less experience, leaving me in a position to wonder what the point was of gaining more. Most of my free time was spent sending out resumes and hoping I'd catch a break sooner or later.
It's remarkable how much difference a year makes. I love my job. There have been days where the rest of my life has not been exactly peachy, but going to work always leaves me happier than I was before. Now that I'm on 2nd year pay (which was greatly improved upon in our new contract), money isn't as tight as it used to be. The people I work with, save a few exceptions, are fantastic. They're a second family, if you will. I really feel like I've found a certain sense of belonging here that I just wasn't finding elsewhere. I feel like I'm doing what I ought to be doing. Granted, there's days where things are delayed, or you fly with the one or two people that you'd really prefer not to, or you're bashing your head against a desk trying to get crew payroll to call you back. But those days are notably rare, and for each one there's at least ten times you blast off from LGA westbound into a sunset and wonder how anybody can do anything other than this for a living.
I stand by my original statements. This is f'n cool. It kicks a$$. It is worth all of the sacrifice, because, as I'm now so fond of saying, this undoubtedly beats working for a living. And though the disgruntled and angry and bitter are often the most vocal people who let you know, despite the way you feel, that your crappy job that you hate is so wonderful, the vast majority, at least that I work with, fully understand and appreciate that this is undoubtedly better than that. It's worth the wait. At least it was for me.
Again, thanks for bringing this up. I hope that it's encouraging to everybody else here in the flightinfo family, but it's undoubtedly good for me to try and add perspective to everything else. I'm a really lucky guy.
As a side note, I wrote a piece for AvWeb back in January about the training experience at Chautauqua. I don't normally like to shamelessly promote my own work here, not to mention put a face to my username in case I really anger somebody down the road. But if you're interested in checking it out, you can view the article at
http://www.avweb.com/news/careers/182542-1.html . I was originally motivated to write the article based on the discussion we all had here last year as a sense of closure for that period of my life. I've heard a lot of great stories from people who have read it and shared their own experiences, and I still love to hear them. Good luck to everybody out there, and I hope your story ends at (or at least ends up progressing to) the place I am right now.