Hotel Crown, Okinawa City, Thursday, 1998-05-14 11:30 local (Z+9)
Hello, All,
Being a natural sack rat is actually quite an advantage when you're stuck where you don't want to be. However, I wish I could force myself into a more productive mode.
One final note concerning my departure from Jakarta. This one won't make me as mad as the previous recounting because it didn't, does not, directly affect me.
At Jakarta, crews were assigned on a FIFO basis, first in—first out. It was the unfortunate bad luck of the crew of which I was a part to be next up when this Okinawa/Thailand shuttle assignment came.
The flight engineer and I bitched and moaned about our bad luck, but we accepted the necessity of somebody having to do it, and the fickle finger of fate had selected us. The captain we were with, however, decided he would do otherwise. He is known as the most selfish, the most self-centered of all Tower captains, and he certainly lived up to his reputation. Upon hearing of the assignment, he hot footed it down to the hotel infirmary, told them he was sick, got some medicine—which they pass out on request, no examination required—and called in sick. This did not set well with the rest of the captains there, especially when he kept strolling around the hotel holding hands with the Indonesian honey he had installed in his room, proclaiming to any crewmembers he met that he really felt terrible, and then winking at them. When the s.o.b. did this to me, I just turned and walked away.
This was the same captain that I wrote of on 1998-04-23. He was doing what he always did, and if he had to throw somebody under the bus to do it, no problem.
His being sick forced crew scheduling to attempt assigning the trip to the next captain up. This captain, knowing what was going on and very senior, flatly refused to take it. At that point, the Jakarta crew scheduler called New York for help. New York said to find the most junior captain at Jakarta and assign him the trip. Seniority is everything, and the junior captain had no choice but to take it. However, when the flight engineer and I left the hotel, the Jakarta scheduler hadn't yet found that captain. He followed us a day later, mad as hell.
The reasons the Okinawa/Thailand shuttle is so unpopular are: you can't make any money, nobody likes Okinawa, the hotel is bad, and the days you do fly are brutal. At least it's warm; that's guaranteed.
At Tower we're paid by the hour with a sixty hour guarantee per month. You only make good money if you can fly more than the sixty. On this shuttle, that can't be done; it's mostly sitting. This is my fourth full day of sitting since the last trip, and I've got one more day to go before we fly again. More about the actual trips later.
So, here I am in the infamous Hotel Crown right outside Gate 2 of the U.S. Air Force's Kadena Air Base. There are three pawn shops right around the corner, conveniently located for military personnel needing to hock something for money to spend at the red light district one block further on.
The hotel is three stories. There are no elevators. The rooms are air-conditioned, the halls are not. The lone window in each low-ceilinged room is frosted. If you want to see out, you open the window and let the heat and humidity in. There's a small television. All channels are in Japanese except for one in English. That one is, unfortunately, the Armed Forces Network (or some such name), the propaganda arm of the U.S. military.
I sincerely hope the military personnel listening do not take seriously the sound bites presented in place of commercials. If they do, they will believe, for example, that Ulysses S. Grant was a great President. Now he may have been a great general—albeit a bit of a drunkard and somewhat uncaring of the number of casualties his army suffered—but the books from which I learned U.S. history held him up as an inept President and his administration as the epitome of corruption. I think I shall accept the view of the history books rather than the military sound bite, but I guess I can't blame them for pushing one of their own. Misinformation is an accepted American practice.
What is Tower Air doing here? There's an annual joint military exercise between the U.S. and Thailand. This year it's called Cobra Gold. We're ferrying troops from the U.S. to Thailand for that exercise. A Tower 747 arrives here from the States loaded with troops. The crew bringing it gets off, the troops stay on, we get on, take them to Thailand, come back to Okinawa, and turn the airplane back to the crew who brought it here. They return it to the States and the process starts again.
More later. The sun is high and hot, and I'm headed for the hotel roof to work on my skin cancer. It's hell keeping up when you have such a crowded social schedule. <g>
Terry
p.t.t.s.—which stands for “post trying to send”. More often than I like, when I try to log on to the Internet to pick up and send email, I am unsuccessful. When I tried to send this, IBM.net told me my network access had been revoked. I think I know what's wrong, they screwed up changing the billing from one credit card to another, but I can't do anything about that from here. There's an 800 number to call, but you can't call an 800 number from Southest Asia. You can from Europe, but not from here. I'll have to have C.J. straighten it out from the states.