Miami, Friday, 1995-06-30 17:00 local (Z-4)
Just a quick note. jumpseated on UPS Wednesday night to Miami to pick up a freighter run to Manaos and then on to Campenas. Both are in Brazil. Manaos appears to be about 1,000 miles or so up the Amazon. I'll have to check that figure. From the map it appears to be the last city of any size on the Amazon. We'll fuel and load/unload cargo there and then go on to Campenas, about 40 miles from Sao Paulo. I'll be stuck there for a couple of days.
On the way to Miami I was treated to one of the better night-time lightning displays I have seen. About an hour out of Louisville there was a huge line of thunderstorms to the south of us, and but for one previous experience, I have never seen as much lightning as was in that line. Quite beautiful, really. Good thing we didn't have to go through it.
The freighter flight was supposed to have left nearly 24 hours ago. It usually runs late, but you can't depend on that. Had I been able to predict its lateness, I would have been able to spend another day at home. As it was, I had to give up one of my xx days commuting to work. In case I haven't explained, xx days are off days that they can't take away from me. I was awarded a bid line for July that started out with x days (one x—the kind they can take away). They took them, but I'll get them back, probably on my first vacation, assuming I last that long with this company.
Walked around the hotel and ran farther. I'm at the Airport Hilton. Nice hotel, sits on a lagoon. You can rent jetcraft and go for a ride. The rates are high, of course, $35 per half hour for the cheapest (slowest) ones. I may try it some time though. I'm supposed to spend 22 hours here on the return trip on July 5. Miami is really becoming a central American city. I had language problems at McDonald's today. They could understand me, but I was having a hard time understanding the heavy Cuban accent. I just plain have problems understanding English as spoken by those who do not speak it as their native language.
Okay, time to go to bed for a nap before leaving.
Terry
Miami, Friday, 1995-06-30 19:00 local (Z-4)
Postscript to previous message.
What do you do when you're sleeping soundly, the telephone rings waking you out of your sound sleep, and the same disembodied voice that a few hours earlier told you everything was a go for your trip now tells you the whole thing is cancelled? Worse, they tell you to deadhead back to New York in the morning on a Tower flight and then commercial to Houston the next day. My solution was to use a choice four letter word after hanging up and then make plans to jumpseat directly from Miami to Houston tomorrow to avoid having to pay for a night's lodging in New York. That will cost the company an extra night's lodging in Houston, but they won't mind that since I'll be saving them the cost of a New York-Houston ticket on TWA. Oh, well.
All Tower pilots were domiciled at JFK, so any night there was at the pilot's expense, about $100 per night on the average. A few pilots had “crash pads.” I tried that for awhile in 1988 when domiciled in Terra Haute, Indiana. It wasn't my cup of tea.
Now, of course, there is the problem of what to do on a Friday night in Miami. Some people would find that a pleasurable problem, but not 55 year old men who would rather be home, would rather have STAYED home an extra two days. Besides, C.J. and I did Miami in January...C.J., it's warmer now, temp and humidity in the low 90s.
It is nice to be able to vent my minor complaints about life in this manner. Makes me feel like everyone is sympathizing with my plight. Don't tell me if you're not.
Actually, the real reason for this postscript is that I forgot to include something in the previous message that I wanted to pass along. Anyone who is using WinCim (I know Jan does) and prints one of these messages that is over one page long may, depending on the printer you're using, find that it drops a line or two from the bottom of each page. If that is your case, you can fix the problem by adding the following statements to the wincim.ini file in \cserve\wincim:
[Margins]
Margin-Units=10
Top-Margin=10
Bottom-Margin=10
Left-Margin=10
Right-Margin=10
The Margin-Units sets the number of divisions in an inch. The others tell how many units to use for each margin. Thus, the above gives one inch margins all around. The problem is that the HP printers (at least the HP550C) do not allow printing lower than 0.59 inches from the bottom of the page. WinCim's defaults assume you can print closer to the bottom than that.
Have fun on this Friday night wherever you are...Terry