Spring Season 2012 was coming, and
it was finally time to leave. The job was 90% done, and work awaited us back in
Ontario. I went down to Guayaquil for a short 3-day stay, and headed off with
Bryn as my copilot on January 28.
The afternoon before we left, I
started to feel that telltale tickle in the back of my throat. “Oh no, not
now…” Downing orange juice and Dayquil the whole way to our first night’s stop
in Grand Cayman, I tried my best to fend it off. But it still got me. Halfway
through the night in Cayman, I woke up with my nose and throat full of fire and
congestion. Raging head cold. Terrific.
Bryn flew the rest of the legs
home while I suffered through the descents to land. We made it to our final
destination of Lakeland, Florida, then piled aboard a commercial airliner to
Toronto. I was home by midnight of January 31, the fastest return trip from
Ecuador in company record. I then promptly spent the next 3 days in bed. NEVER
fly with a cold.
Just before this trip, I had been
wrangling with what to do about this job of mine. Company organization was
continuing to degenerate. Back in November, I was removed from duty on the Twin
Commander, the new turbine aircraft in the fleet, in favour of a part-timer who
would take over the Ecuador job in my place. The reasoning behind this decision
continues to mystify me. I never flew the Commander again.
So in the wake of that miserable
conversation, I started half-heartedly job-seeking. I didn’t want to leave, but
it was becoming an intolerable situation. And maybe it was high time I tried to
step things up a bit.
I did now have a big 42 hours of
turbine time, after all, so I updated my application profiles on the Air
Canada, Westjet and Jazz websites to reflect this. I sent out a few e-mails in
response to some AvCanada ads. I did get a callback from Thunder Air, an
operator who flew King Air’s and a couple Mitsubishi MU-2’s (which fly the same
engines as the Commander), and was promptly offered employment over the phone.
I considered it. But in light of relocating to Timmins and a reduction in pay,
I eventually opted to just tough it out, and hope that the spring season would
allow me back into the Commander. I wrote back by e-mail turning down the offer
the day after I returned from Ecuador.
The morning after the e-mail, my
phone rang. I expected it was the Chief Pilot of Thunder Air calling after
reading my message. I let it ring. I could barely talk from the congestion in
my head and throat, and was barely conscious besides. The phone predictably
chimed three times, indicating that the caller had left a voicemail that was
translated into text by Telus.
Curiosity overcame fatigue and a
stuffy nose, and I finally fumbled the phone off the shelf to see who called.
It was from a 902 area code, which I thought was from Halifax, not Thunder Bay.
I read the messages in disbelief.
“Hi this message is from Samantha
at Jazz Air, we are calling to schedule an interview with you. Please give me a
call back to schedule a date if you are interested. Thank you.”
Jazz. This must be a
cold-medication-induced dream, I thought. Am I asleep still? No, I seem to be
rather awake. Or did the Telus voicemail-to-text system hear it wrong?
I flew to the big windows of my
condo where my phone could get a good cell signal and returned the call. Sure
enough, my number had been drawn. Samantha set up an interview date in Toronto
for 5 days hence. Thankfully there was no flying to be done that week. I was
unable to go back to sleep.
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