Where The Hell Is Phil?

This Winter In Snowboarding

2008-05-02T20:38:00.005-06:00

Instead of making you all endure a snowboard update every two minutes or so, I figured I'd wait till the end of the season and write one big cohesive blowout. That way, if I died an ignominous death at the hands of frozen water, you wouldn't hear about it.
This was the first year I got to try out my new rig... a pair of Burton Moto boots and Burton Mission bindings on a 2008 Burton Air snowboard. The boots and bindings I got last year at a Spring sale, where amazingly I met Casey, an old friend of mine from Baton Rouge who'd moved here to Utah while I wasn't looking. Like right down the damn street here in Utah. The board is new, and has kind of a story... the short version is my mother bought it for me, and the long version is that my mother's father, who skied right up until he died, smiled down on her as she bought it for me with her inheritance. And so it's kind of a gift from both of them, and I often thought of them as I was blasting out of control down the mountain this season.
This was also the first year I went snowboarding with a goatee. Discovered that it actually freezes to your face above a certain altitude. And it feels frozen for the rest of the day; it's like a phantom ice beard for hours after you've thawed.

Last year I didn't really venture past the kiddie slope, but this year I went higher, prodded by boarder Casey, his girlfriend Roxy (a lifelong skier whom he calls the Queen of Death), and my own pride. Caromed down steeper runs, and learned a little more control at higher speeds. Learned about a little thing called ice face. Ice face is when you wipe out and your board sprays snow all over your face. It seems kinda funny and innocuous, but then the pain begins... it's ice, and it's on your face (hence the name), and you can't get it off because you have gloves on. So you have to sit there with your face freezing off, waving your arms and keening like a fairy, until it melts. Solution: do not wipe out.

Also saw something I can only describe as a bra tree. Again, it's a fairly straightforward name... on one of the lifts, you pass over a tree strung with about fifty brassieres. After much internet research, I discovered that brassieres come from naked girls, which are about the last things you would expect to encounter outside in the winter, much less in groups of fifty. I cannot account for this tree. However, I kept a close eye on it.
I also learned how to drive (and how not to drive) up a mountain in snow. It's a spooky feeling to try to pass a bus on a mountain road and suddenly your wheels start spinning and you start drifting backwards. Another dumb thing I did was slide into a snowbank. I was wheeling into the parking lot, and as I made the turn, my wheels thought it would be funny to go a different direction, and they drifted me into a ten foot wall of snow. Couldn't get the car out... wheels would only spin. And naturally, there was a whole parking lot full of people there to laugh at me when I finally tunneled out the window. Luckily, several of those people were buff college guys who helped extricate my car while I maintained a high state of embarrassment.

The last time I went out this season, Casey and the QOD brought me up the the tip-top of Snowbird. You can see over the whole Salt Lake valley, all the way to the mountains on the other side. It's a jaw-dropping view. And the ride down is equally as jaw-dropping, but in a different way... your jaw gets blown off your face by the sheer speed. There were several times I was sure I was going to die. On a narrow path with a wall of ice on one side and a steep cliff on the other, you can't brake... all you can do is continue going the speed of sound and not turn. But I learned as I went, through powder and ice, and though I had some pretty spectacular falls, I kept up with Casey and the Queen, and made it to the bottom each time. And now I can say I'm an intermediate snowboarder.
Next year, double black diamond. I am unstoppable.

That Was Easy!

2008-05-01T23:11:00.000-06:00

400!

2008-04-25T00:14:00.000-06:00

Can't believe it's been a hundred posts since that dumb 300 picture I put up. Couldn't think of anything significant about the number 400, so I'm just going to say yay 400.

The Dumbest Cab Driver On Planet Earth

2008-04-24T23:50:00.001-06:00

I can't even believe this happened.
We finish the day in San Antonio, and it's midnight when we get out of the airport. The hotel shuttles usually pick us up, but they stop running at midnight, and so the standard procedure is to grab a cab and the hotel pays for it. We know that. Cabbies know that. We approach this cab guy, who looks at us like we're trash and indelicately lobs our suitcases in the back. The crew shares a look at that point which says there goes the tip. We get to the hotel and as we're getting our own stuff out of the cab so as to prevent any further cab driver damage, I explain to him that they'll pay him at the desk.
"No, I no go eensigh. Joo paigh me here," this man says.
"All you have to do," I repeat slowly, "is take the reciept inside, and the guy at the desk will pay you. The hotel is paying for you to bring us here."
"I no go eensigh," he says with a defiant foot stamp. "Joo have to paigh me ousigh."
"It's ten feet to the desk," I say. "We'll even show you the way."
Defiance. Foot stamp.
The captain intercedes with very little effect. In fact, the only effect this intercession has is to further enrage the cabbie. He shouts, "Joo saigh you would paigh me!" This is actually something none of us said, because we knew the hotel was going to paigh him. And while he's shouting this, he's trying to point at the one of us that said that thing we didn't say, and can't figure out which one of us actually spoke to him at the airport. He just keeps repeating that one of us said we would pay him and pointing back and forth between us. We eventually just headed inside, thinking that he would follow, and then get paid at the desk when we all arrived there. Instead, he stood right there by the cab, shouting that we needed to pay him.
While we signed in at the desk, I peeked out the window. He was just sitting there in the cab, not at all coming inside. He was still there when we got in the elevator.
Does any of you have any idea what the hell this was all about? It's killing me.

Will Ya Wait Already?

2008-04-22T23:45:00.003-06:00

Today, during the captain's howdy speech, this customer service agent gets on the plane after we've gotten everyone on board and wants me to make an announcement to see if a particular passenger is on this plane. I say sure, and stand there to wait until the captain is done. But the CSA stares at me for a moment, then makes little shooing motions. She wants me to make the announcement now. On top of the captain's announcement. Besides that being a technical impossibility because of the way the interphone works, it would be just plain rude. And every one of you has been blasted into the next seat by the way-too-loud speakers we announce over; there's no way this lady didn't realize there was an announcement already going on.
There's a planet CSAs come from. But it isn't this one.

The Exit Row Sleeper

2008-04-21T23:36:00.004-06:00

Checking with the exit row passengers is something I usually approach with a feeling somewhere between trepidation and outright annoyance. See, there's up to four people I have to put this question to: "Are you willing and able to assist in an emergency?" And very few just say yes. We're about to take off, and they want to chat with you. Or they don't want to actually say yes. Or they want to make you ask them again because of the 'times question repeated = personal importance' formula. But my favorite... my absolute favorite is the jackhole who's sleeping in the exit row. I don't want to shake this guy awake because he might have just closed his eyes for a moment, so I ask the question loudly, hoping to snap him awake. That never works, because he's always in a coma. So I get three almost-yesses from the other people and then have to wake this guy up and ask a second time.
You know exactly what he does then; blearily finds me with his eyes, squints, sniffs, and says, "Whaa?" This makes me ask a third time, and by that time I'm ready to just throw him out the emergency exit then.
Why can't we just put passengers in cryo-sleep like in space movies?

FAIL

2008-04-19T02:13:00.002-06:00

You can find some pretty funny stuff on the internet. For example, look up 'FAIL.' You'll find pictures of all sorts of dumb things people have done while they were attempting to do something cooler, and these pictures are only eclipsed in mirth by ones found while searching for 'EPIC FAIL.' Here's one I found that applies to me (and no I did not do this).

I've Made The Big Time

2008-04-18T02:06:00.002-06:00

Someone left a Men's Health magazine on the plane today, and I snatched it up, gleeful that I wouldn't be forced to read about more damn Lauren and Heidi. One of the things in this magazine was a list of unexpected things that make you sick. Things like shopping carts and public phones. Number six was a flight attendant. How about that... I'm an agent of doom. BLEAH BLEAH BLEAH!

I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING!

2008-04-15T01:56:00.000-06:00

I had been dreading this day. And today was it. This morning, during the first announcement, I forgot where the hell we were going. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board Alpha-Bits Airlines Flight 666, with service to BOOP." I had nothing. It was gone. Fifty cabbage heads were staring at me, waiting to find out for where they were destined. Felt like I was in A Christmas Story. Luckily, this was one of the two-FA planes, and the other one leaned casually over and whispered the answer into the PA. Not sure if that made her helpful or a jerk, but the passengers were laughing so hard that I didn't really have to find out.

A Pilot's Job

2008-04-13T01:54:00.003-06:00

This last captain I flew with was most of a riot. The first thing he told me was what both of their jobs were up in the flight deck. "The F.O.'s job is to keep us out of the chief pilot's office. My job is to keep us off CNN."
Wish my job description was that simple.

That Guy, You Know The One

2008-04-12T01:45:00.000-06:00

There's always this guy that, during your announcements, waves at you with the 'I can't hear you, your announcements aren't going out' wave. Every nineteenth flight or so, there he is. There's nothing we can do about it... one of the few things we can't control is the volume on the PA. The horizontal, yes. The vertical, ditto. But no volume. So this last time I saw the wave, I toddled over after the announcement to tell him about our volumetric impotence. And he said, "WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

Back Row Tango

2008-04-10T14:35:00.002-06:00

Normally, and I think I've mentioned this before, passengers flip out when they see they're sitting in the last row. I don't wanna sit next to the bathroom. These seats don't recline. I have to walk so far to get back here, and even longer to get back off the plane. Well, on a fifty-minute hop, you just listen to the whining and kick these people around in your mind when they're gone, but on a three hour flight, it works a little different. See, the FA rules say that on long flights, you're allowed to sit in a passenger seat (provided there isn't a passenger already in it [unless they're into that {and if you look really hard on the internet, you'll find where I posted those stories}]). And usually, we head for the back row, because it's the only seat on the bus where no one can lean in from behind and ask you if you're a flight attendant. Most FAs will try to pre-clear the back row as passengers board for this express purpose. I can move you to another seat, sir... these ones don't recline... and they're really so awfully far from the front. And naturally, the only damn time someone doesn't have a problem with the back row is on one of these four-hour anti-chiropractic extravaganzas. They sit there with their hands laced behind their heads as if they were reclining, smiling and saying ahhh a lot. You know, kind of the opposite way from the way we're both sitting, crammed into the galley like dirty clothes in a laundry bag.
Oh well. That's life.

PHIL KILLS A MOUNTAIN!

2008-04-07T23:30:00.002-06:00

Where We're Going We Don't Need... VFR

2008-04-05T19:20:00.001-06:00

Today we landed in Kalispell, and I can't believe we actually even tried to. Through a bizarre combination of cold air, warm ground, snow, and fog, the runway became this:

See all that white back there behind the truck? Yeah, that's buildings you (and the pilots) can't see. And the cement was pouring fog, like in a zombie movie. I actually looked for zombies. Didn't see any. It was Montana, after all.
Glad we got good pilots.

We're Going Down, Down, Down, Down

2008-04-04T19:05:00.001-06:00

I noticed the other day how many FAs and pilots say that we've begun the initial descent into a city in their announcements. I gotta side with George Carlin on this one... how many damn times are we going to descend?

Call Of The Ramper

2008-04-02T18:49:00.002-06:00

Back at work. Going on a trip after so many weeks off is really weird. And to add to the surrealism, this:
Yesterday at LAX, we're on the ground with most of the passengers on board and waiting to close the door. And I hear this: "EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeew!" It sounds just like a kitten, except to be heard over the 14 jet engines outside, this kitten would have to be the size of a bulldozer. I don't want that kitten, so I pretend I didn't hear anything. And there it is again: "EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeew!" I fly in the face of self-preservation and decide that I can't go to my grave not knowing what that sound is, so I poke my head out the door. There's a big Samoan ramper standing there, waving at another guy who clearly doesn't see him. And the Samoan guy takes a big deep breath and (you guessed it) says, "EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeew!"
It makes sense when you think about it. You would imagine that rampers, being big strapping fellows all, would scream at each other like basso lumberjacks. But the jet engines are taking up all the low frequencies, and so to be heard, you have to flip way up to tweeter range, which is what this guy was doing. At first I thought maybe it was just that one guy, but we were in and out of LAX all day that day, and everybody was eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewing at each other. I can't believe I hadn't noticed it before.
After a day of watching 400-pound rampers meow at each other, I just wanted to crawl back into bed and OD on Bomb Pops.

Lost Flavors Of My Youth

2008-03-28T22:55:00.004-06:00

So you all know what to do when you have a sickness-induced sore throat. You limp into a Wal-mart and grab you some popsicles. It had been years, though, since I'd done that, because I hadn't been sick in a long time. So I thought it would be an easy mission. Wrong. Since the last time I went to buy popsicles, the damn meek have inherited the Earth.
All I wanted was the box of red, orange, and purple popsicles. That's all I wanted. And no, they're not cherry, Florida orange, and grape flavor... they're red flavor, orange flavor, and purple flavor. The kind I'm talking about taste like red, orange, and purple. You know the kind I mean. Shaped like a bullet, comes in a box of 960, and has more sugar in it than you could actually fit into the popsicle mold. Well, I'm standing there in the frozen dessert aisle (a name I would shortly discover to be a grievous misnomer) and I see a red, orange, and purple box, and I grab it. But when I get it home and open one up, it's not bullet-shaped and bright red. It's a dull and organic-looking crimson, and is shaped like a non-interesting block. It doesn't taste like sugar. It tastes like diet. I resort to the lowest form of investigation and read the box; "NOW ALL NATURAL! MADE WITH REAL FRUIT FLAVORS!" Oh no, I think. Oh NO. It's the same box, made by the same people. But the popsicles inside have been gelded.
What the HELL is this? I think.
I head back to the store and return to the aisle. And there before me are rows and rows of eggshell, ecru, and water-chestnut flavored processed popsicle-type snack foods. I think the whole damn aisle had about six grains of sugar on it, total. Gone were the real popsicles made from thick, artery-clogging syrup. Gone were the tubes of nuclear-colored liquid that you froze yourself and commited suicide with later. Gone, in a real if microcosmic and slightly melodramatic sense, were the days when iron playground equipment bothered nobody and the only rule was be home before the streetlights came on.
I was sick, so I don't really remember, but I think I may have fallen to my knees and wept, right there in Wal-mart. Then again, it may have been just a really good coughing fit.
But there at the end of the aisle shone my salvation. I crawled, coughing and sneezing, toward the red, white, and blue glow, and there they hovered, like an explosive and good ol' American middle finger to the tofu-chewing healthier-than-thou masses. Bomb Pops. Cherry, lime, and raspberry flavored red-white-'n-blue missiles of GLUCOSE ROCKETING STRAIGHT FOR YOUR BRAIN. I'm pretty sure that in a perfect world, these things would be red, green, and off-red, but come on, if they looked like that, the terrorists win. These things are awesome. They're not made out of dry crumbly orange-peel flavored ice. These things are chewy, made so in a way that only ice scientists know how to do. There are no stupid jokes on the stick to distract you from the fact that you're eating a rust-flavored icicle... the makers of Bomb Pops rightly know that after you've eaten one, you're so jacked up on sugar that you can't read.
And so, for the next week I lay in bed, a red ring around my slack mouth, thinking about how after all the adversity, the Rolling Stones were right all along.
Come to think of it, I might have gotten better earlier if not for those things. But COME ON! BOMB POPS!

Phil Laid Low

2008-03-28T22:30:00.001-06:00

I start off a lot of posts by saying that I am not dead. But this time, I think I may have actually temporarily died.
On the last day of the second to last trip I went on, I drank some tomato juice on the plane, thinking I could do that without a reprisal from nature. Nature responded; about two in the AM, I woke up in a state I shall not describe... I had been botulized. Spent the next two days in a tomato-hued delirium. On the third day, I felt good enough to attempt to go back to work. Again, nature responded. What you have to know here is that, just a few months ago, I had my first flu shot ever. You'll remember me saying earlier in the blog that I haven't been sick once since I've been attending flight, even though the planes are teeming hives of disease. I am not sure what made me think I needed a flu shot, because I wasn't broken, and you all know what not to do when it's not broken. So, whether it was that I had legitimately become invulnerable to sickness and then went and screwed it up with a flu shot, or that I had given the raspberry to Fate by being healthy for almost two years and she responded, I got sick.
Oh I got sick. For three damn weeks I got sick. When they talk about the superflu, they're not talking about a virus in tights and a cape, they're talking about this mother. I went through every possible phase of sickness except for the throwing up phase, and I think that's because I'd already been tomatoed earlier in the month. First few days were the dizzy-fever-sweat nap days. After that it was the muscle ache-sore throat section of the film (it was during this section that I made a psyche-shattering discovery that needs its own entry [which follows this one]). Then it was the coughing-losing the voice part. I did it all. And for how long? I don't remember the flu lasting this long when I got it when I was a kid. It was kinda fun back then. Stay home from school, parents are suddenly nice, and all the Sprite you can drink, in trade for a few days of feeling like funk.
This thing that just hit me was totally different. I'm just now rid of it. What was cool was seeing all my friends rally to help me back onto my feet. I usually have this subconscious feeling that I'm alone in Utah because I don't ever have time here to go out and make friends. But Katy was there with groceries, May Rose was there with daily 'are you still alive' phone calls... I actually had people from several different states calling for progress reports. And no, you guys out there in internet land didn't know I was dying, but you did notice I was gone, and it was nice to see messages like "We're going to kill you if you don't update soon, you spank!" That's the real-world equivalent of snapping your fingers. Thanks for keeping me alive.

Out Of My Eye, You

2008-03-14T20:28:00.001-06:00

This job seems to be all about keeping bad things out of your eyes. Even a thing as innocuous as closing the aircraft door is an ocular invasion waiting to happen. When the door's open, it's stairs, and so while you're busy saying hello several hundred times, it's collecting the dirt and bits of junk that fall off of people's shoes to use on you later. When, you ask? Why, when you close the door, of course. By now I've learned to always keep my eyes shut when I haul the door closed, because if you're looking up when the door clangs shut over your head, it gleefully flings its detritus right in your eyes. And at that point, I'm sorry to say, your only option is to stagger around the aisle with your hands over your eyes, screaming, "I'M BLIND I'M BLIND!" That scares passengers. The pilots think it's a riot, though.
Speaking of that... this one girl I flew with had flown with another airline that used old and banged-up planes, and once when she opened the lav door, the door carved several spiral bits of metal out of the door track, and they fell into both her eyes. What do you do, I asked her, when you have lav shrapnel sticking out of your eyes? She went to the hospital is what she did, where they put yellow dye in her eyes so they could see the metal bits and pluck them out with tweezers ohhhh. And that crappy airline made her work the next day, yellow eyes and all. What a crappy airline.

A Thing Red Beans Are Not Good In

2008-03-12T20:43:00.002-06:00

This last time in Vancouver, I started out with a plan. We stay in two hotels there. One is next to Yaohan, the big Chinese market, and the other is in the middle of larger and sprawling Chinatown. This time, I was gonna connect the two in my head on a walking tour. Armed with a vague sense of direction and some shoes, I headed out. I missed Yaohan by about six miles on the way forward, but I did catch sight of one of those big glass apartment buildings I remembered from Chinatown in the distance, and so set a course for them. By the time I was close to the building, I started recognizing stuff. And one of the places was the Asian grocery store I'd gotten that White Rabbit candy from last time. I seem to remember making a threat right here on this very blog to try the red bean flavor next time I was in Vancouver, and so I grabbed some along with my Pocky. For those of you who thought I was kidding about red bean flavored candy, I wasn't:

They're not good. I'd rather eat these than say, an eyeball, but damn are they not good. The red bean in question here is not some mystical and foreign bean that grows in China and tastes good sweet. It's our good old Cajun red bean, the same one you put in red beans and rice. This stuff is the equivalent of broccoli-flavored ice cream.

But speaking of ice cream... I did find something called mochi. I'd eaten some of this stuff before, but the Asian store in SLC doesn't carry it, so I jumped on it. Mochi is an ice-cream filled rice cake, and as weird as that sounds, it's ever weirder than that. Imagine biting into a ball of raw dough and striking ice cream. Mochi. There's vanilla, strawberry, green tea, and mango flavors, and despite my description, they're great. You can probably get them as dessert at a sushi place; those of you who are raw fish-compatible should definitely look 'em up.
There's non-ice cream mochi, the ice cream having been replaced with flavored bean curd. Not sure about those.
Also hit that Asian video store again, and this time bought an Japanese DVD. Figured they'd have subtitles, and I was right... they're just in Chinese. Doesn't matter though... it's an hour of giant robots killing other giant robots. That's the international language.
Found Yaohan on the way back. Was right where I left it.

The World Is My Kid's Playpen

2008-03-11T20:00:00.001-06:00

There are often babies on board, just like those suction cup signs in the 80s warned. Most of the time, the attached parents are good people and make sure their kid doesn't cause a ruckus. But a few of these gene donors just sit there in a disheveled heap, making sure we know they think they deserve a martini just because they have a child, and let the rest of the world worry about entertaining/restraining/cleaning up after their progeny. If the kid's old enough to walk, it's in the aisle, running up and down, screaming and slapping strangers (I'm not sure what makes parents buy a three-hundred dollar BMW-compatible carseat for their car which goes around 80mph, and then let their rugrat dance around unrestrained on a vehicle that travels upwards of 500mph). If it's old enough to eat, it's crumbling up crackers and sowing them into the carpet, apparently trying to grow a cheese cracker orchard. And if it's not old enough to do anything, it's sitting on someone's oh-so-weary lap, tearing up the safety card. This, above all, grieves me. Babies break stuff. You know this. Why, then, would you ensure that your monster is breaking something that does not belong to you? The thing's already broken your will to live... why not give it your hand to chew on for an hour or so?
I know, I know, I don't have a kid. I don't understand the hell on Earth it is to be a parent. But I was a kid once, and I do know that my mother would have sooner stuck a thumb in my eye than let me throw crackers all over an airplane seat, and certainly wouldn't have walked away smiling without cleaning it up if I had.
Wow... I think this job really is making me bitter. Wait a second... nope, nope. Not bitter. Sour, but not bitter.

A New Class Of Stupid

2008-03-10T19:14:00.000-06:00

Lately I've been running into these clowns that evidently have been taught that the more times you make someone ask you something, the more important you are. I'll ask what they want to drink and get nothing. I assume they didn't hear me (though they're just reading and are not iPodded) and repeat, and then they'll calmly look up at me in a way that tells me 'yes I heard you the first time, I just didn't answer.' I've thought of several explanations. One is that they're a king in a foreign land, and it breaks all manner of tribal tradition to answer the door on the first knock. Another is that my dashing good looks have created a tiny black hole right there between me and the foreign clown king, and it just takes several seconds for my first question to travel backwards and then forwards in time and reach their ears. But the one I'm going with is that these poor people have been born with a shortage of brain cells, and the computing power necessary to decode a question like 'whaddya want to drink?' monopolizes them, ensuring that nothing else can happen during the decoding process. So while it may look outwardly like they're smarmy elitist self-proclaimed royalty, they're actually humbly and furiously diagramming what I said inside their skull.
It's good I came up with that. I'd hate to think they were being rude.

An Earth What?

2008-03-08T19:28:00.000-07:00

I lived through another earthquake.
A few weeks ago, there was a 6.0 on the Nevada-Utah border, and apparently it knocked a couple of buildings down there. Shook things as far east as Salt Lake. I slept through it. Only found out about it because, on the way to work that morning, the radio was aflame with folk screaming about how things were "just a-shakin'." They never interview doctoral candidates after natural disasters, do they?

Sometimes Rampers Do It Wrong

2008-03-06T19:12:00.001-07:00

Today I saw them pull a passenger ramp up to the plane for 30 passengers that could walk, and then take it away for one lady in a wheelchair so she had to walk up the steep stairs. I have no explanation.

The Royal We

2008-03-04T17:23:00.002-07:00

Just recently I've been working the one-FA plane. And a funny thing that happens when you start working by yourself after you've gotten used to working with someone else all the time is that, during your announcements, you begin to refer to yourself as 'we.' I hadn't even noticed I was doing it until someone asked me where the other FA was. I explained that I was king of the aircraft, and would continue to refer to myself as 'we' until I was dethroned at the next revolution. Unsurprisingly, they didn't get it.
Education doesn't make you smart. It just makes you not funny.