Sorry for the lack of recent updates, but nothing "new" has happened.
Until Monday just gone, when I received a text from my agency saying that with immediate effect, I would be finishing at 1am, not 2am. The logic being that now the summer holidays are over, the number of big, late flights has reduced, thus less headcount required. And to an extent, that is right.
On Monday night, however, there were still six big flights due in after 1am and it resulted in Supervisors et al having to leave the comfy office to go and unload the planes. Today was my first night back on shift and an eyed up the flights after midnight - 6 from 12am to 1am and NINE from 1am to 2am. Iwas not in the least bit surprised when I called my last scheduled job in at 00.45 - "can you stop on for an hour - we'll pay you for 2".
And so it came to pass that we finally unloaded the ErictheLion flight (Heraklion) and were back in the crew room at 02.13. The Duty Manager was extremely grateful to the 3 of us who stayed and even gave a lift straight back to the staff car park, rather than having to catch the staff bus. And he let us smoke in the car en route.
I expect the same to happen later on today as Sunday's are busier than Saturday's.
The contract I'm on expires on 31/10 and I am led to believe that we should be informed who is being kept on permanently, some time this week. The bottom line is they are keeping about 30% of the 150 or so they took on over the summer. Will I be one of them? I don't know, but stopping on when they are short of bodies always goes down well and I have always volunteered. Fingers crossed.
Relationships with British Airways continue to plumb new depths and one of our lot was accused of clobbering a BA bus with his electric buggy. The general feeling is that the bus driver managed to do the damage and has simply blamed us for it - for starters the damage occurred in part of the airport we simply don't use - it's pure BA territory and secondly if the 3 and 1/2 ton electric buggy
had hit it, the damage would be pretty extensive. Lying bastards!
One of the blokes who started at the same time as me, through the same agency, is a Scouser, Despite this, he's not a bad lad - he was in the Navy for 22 years and remarkably well-read. For a Scouser. We had a bet about a month ago about wearing shorts - who would be the first to put trousers on when it got colder. Lo and behold, today he was wearing trousers - poof! So all the coffees have been on him today. And I accidentally nearly broke his arm - I was chucking the bags from the dark recesses of the hold of an A320 to the hatch and he was too slow taking a previous bag out - BANG - 26kg of fake Louis Vuitton luggage crushed his arm against the side of the hold door. Whoops...
Right, time to hit the sack, I've gotta be back there in 9 1/2 hours...
