02 September 2004 02:24
odd day and all. forstarters it was foggy when i woke up... only the second time it's been that way since i got here. we get many many low overcasts, but no ground fogs. wound up at work dripping wet from my bike ride, little droplets of dew on my arm hair and in my beard...pretty cool effect. by the time we took off you couldn't see 150 feet in front of you, but you could see blue sky above.it was a quiet day in the air, we flew a region out of everybody's way for the first half up by burbank. could see planes coming down the ILS 08, but nobody was on our frequency. kind of eerie (thanks Rebekah), just like having a split audio panel. in the kingairs we have dual audio panels, so each pilot can be on a different freq. what makes it odd is still having the intercom on. routinely at the start of the region we get atis (weather info). i'll say something like "you have number one" just to let the captain know what's up. meanwhile i switch him to number one only and i tune the number two radio into the atis freq. so i'll be hearing the broadcast (a continuous loop of wx information) of which the captain hears nothing. meanwhile i can't hear anythign socal says on his frequency. there's more than enough ambient noise in the cockpit to drown out the sound of his voice, so when he keys the mike, i can see his lips move but can't hear a word. but when he lets off the mike i can hear him on the intercom. it's not uncommon to have people start to talk without realizing you're trying to listen to atis... because they can't hear it. it's like somebody talking to you while you're on the phone with somebody else. they can't hear the somebody else, so they think you should be able to manage to at least understand what they're trying to get across to you without being patient enough to wait for you to finish the phone conversation first. (that's not a pet peave of mine... mainly because i am extremely prone to being not patient enough to wait :|).
it was a short flight day though, becuase i only did one load. i haven't done that in a long time.. normally the one load flights are done by the part time employees. i swapped with a coworker because i had a flight medical this afternoon. that's an annual thing. i'm discovering a trend in faa certified medical examiners. for starters they're all in their seventies (i've been to three different ones, so i'm making some generalizations here...call it artistic license. but two of them were in their seventies, the third was in his fifties, which of course is close enough to seventy to be seventy). second, they like to shoot the bull about aviation, because it's their only link--the rest of their time is spent in the medical world. the first examiner i went to had a dedicated aviation practice. the other two work the aviation in where they can. the second after hours, the third only on wed-fri. rough life. yeah, speaking of which, the medical center has hours from nine to five, m-f, with 12 to two off for lunch! i think they're being overworked.
third, and related to two, they're more interested in shooting the bull about aviation than they are about giving the exam. the last two guys i've been to, i've literally spent more time talking about my job than i have being examined. it goes like this (today's adventure). first i ride home and shower, then i get back on my bike and ride seven and a half miles to the doctor's office. i walk in and have to request the medical form (expediency is decidedly not in these people's vocabulary). i fill it out and wait for my name to be called. ten minutes later i decide i'm done waiting, so i go hand her the form (which apparently she'd been waiting on without really caring if it ever showed up). i go grab a drink and sit back down. she calls me back up to get me to spell my address out for her, which i'd clearly written on the form. (but just on the odd chance that you're checking up on me with my parents, maybe it wasn't the Clearest, but it was still legible. but you know, i've had a lot of people out here have issues with Singers Glen. maybe that name's too hick for them or something. they even have the advantage of having me pronounce it "singers", not "sangers" like some locals i know).
meanwhile i was making headway in "the virginian" by owen wister, which is shaping up to be a gripping read. the secretary finally made the handoff to the pretty nurse's assistant who duly recorded my weight. she didn't measure my height, but just asked me what it was. i could have told her what my weight was going to be too :). i dutifully visited the restroom to leave a sample, before mosying down to get an eye exam that lasted all of sixty seconds. she was either new at her job or found me irrisistably handsome, because she seemed somewhat nervous. i don't think i looked frighteningly brutish, but i guess that's the third option. i think it was the first, because i can't even spell irrisistably. that, and it's official according to more than one person that i'm "too skinny." :).
she left me in a room and the doctor walked in five pages later. i could hear him coming, talking non-stop. the talking didn't stop either. he had this interesting habit though of talking in two sentence paragraphs, with very little correlation from one paragraph to the next. it was a series of statements about aviation, punctuated by a good number of questions. but after recieving the answer, he'd start the next statement on something completely different. "so where are you from?" shenendoah valley blah blah, "That's real nice area. When the second world war ended I went back to college to get my degree. About 100% of those who opted out went back for their degree. My parents were in China for 12 years--I was born there, but I was too young to remember it much. So you're working with those dynamic guys, that's good, that's good. Do you guys have to do much maintenence on those beech turboprops?" &c. interesting interesting it was. especially the china bit. if he would have paused htere, i would have figured out what they were doing there. it didn't sound military, so it might have been missionary, although it was the 20's and early 30's...i didn't think there were many westerner's in china in the post-boxer/red army era. esp not for 12 years. but coming back they took the trans-siberian railroad all the way back to eruope and flew out of there. i just thought that was pretty darn cool. i wanna go :).
so he checked my blood pressure, listened to my heart, looked in my eyes and ears, then spent the rest of the time talking and filling out thte form. no banging the kneecaps, no listening to the lungs, no checking for weird growths in the abdomen. i had to pull my shirt up for the heart listening, but never had to drop my pants. these medical's keep getting easier. i have a feeling that trend will dramatically reverse in a decade or so, but for now it's good to be 23 and in good health. these 70yo doctors look at me and say, "come now, there's nothin wrong with that spring chicken, let me sign that medical." no complaints here. even if it did take an hour and a half to do eight minutes worth of work. (psychologically it feels better to pay $75 for an hour and a half than for eight minutes ;) ).
my return marked 25 miles spent on my bike today, so i celebrated by catching up on comics for the next hour or so.
http://www.comics.com/comics/pearls/archive/pearls-20040806.html
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