Athens, Sunday, 1995-05-14 19:00 local (Z+3)
Hello, all....
What happens when your laptop battery is exhausted and you don't have an adapter for U.S. to Greek electrical outlets and neither does the hotel and you can't buy one on a Sunday evening? You wind up sitting on the toilet sideways with the laptop on a ledge and plugged into the shaver outlet.
Brutal flight, 9 hours eastbound leaving JFK in late afternoon. That put us over France having to contend with French controllers when we were really starting to run out of energy, but then it got worse—Italian controllers. They really jacked jacked us around. It would have helped a lot if I was “current” insofar as knowing the routes and trying to decipher their brand of English. It's all coming back slowly, but in the meantime it's frustrating, especially when I'm so tired.
Beautiful sunnny weather when we arrived here this morning about 11:00 local, temp in the 70s. It was a shame to waste the day in bed rather than on a beach, but bed was what I needed. I'm up now just to get some food and walk around little, then back to bed for an early morning departure. If today was bad, tomorrow will be worse. We're scheduled for 20 hours of duty, but it'll probably go to 30.
Another crew took the airplane from here to Kuwait. They'll load it with U.S. troops, take them to Frankfurt, and then return the airplane to us—really brutal day for them. We'll take it to Kuwait, pick up another load for Frankfurt, and then be released at Frankfurt—except we'll probably stay on the airplane since it is then headed back to JFK empty. We'll be in the back sleeping as best we can. That'll get us back a day earlier than scheduled, avoid the hassle of commercialling out of Frankfurt, and earn us some more extended duty pay. It's good for the company, too—saves them the hotel costs in Frankfurt. When we do this kind of thing (staying on the airplane instead of going to a hotel and commercialling), they pay us the extra duty time up to the cost of what they would have paid for the commercial ticket to return us to JFK. Thus they always save the hotel cost and may save part of the commercial ticket.
This won't get sent until I get some place other than Greece. Logging on to Compuserve in Greece is through another network. I downloaded instructions for doing that before leaving New York, thought I had the proper script file, but I now find out there are two networks with confusing similar abbreviations, IFN and INF. I already had the instructions for IFN and didn't realize what I really wanted was INF.