November 2012

Welcome to the holidays and the 4th November bid I have covered,

Thanksgiving begins my favorite time of year, the holidays. For many of you it is the same. Tradition is a funny thing and my family has lots of tradition even if it is largely not recognized. Food is certainly one of the major parts of the holiday where everyone is allowed to be glutenous and merry and... thankful. I encourage you to be thankful as well. Even when tragedy strikes there are (often overlooked) blessings that we should recognize.






Growing up in DeWitt, Arkansas there was a hymn my church used to sing, "Count your Blessings". It seems to be very appropriate to reference that song as it is common to overlook just how blessed you are. The guy who wrote that hymn, Ira D. Sankey, watched Chicago burn to the ground and nearly lost his life trying to escape the fire. As for fire, yeah, we had a big one here in Colorado Springs this year. That it didn't effect us any more than smoke is enough to make me very thankful. Regardless of your fortune, you are fortunate to be alive. So be blessed and count your many blessings, see what the Lord has done. Count your many blessing name them one by one.


Okay, enough preaching, let's do some homework. Looking back on my past three Novembers I have blogged about, I worked Thanksgiving in '09, but had it off in '10 with vacation awarded and by bidding last year. I am hoping to bid for and hold it off again this year. I did a little math and found that COS has 16 trips (including 700 forward and aft) that would fall on or over Thanksgiving day. That isn't bad at all. I remember Christmas in '10 that had 25 trips on or over that holiday so I am pleased that the crew planners have eased up a bit comparatively.

Still, 16 COS flight attendants will be working on Thanksgiving. How one bids becomes incredibly important, to say the least, when trying to bid for a holiday off. If one bids too restrictive, well, it ain't going to be pretty. If one bids very conservative your likelihood of getting what you want is increased. In 2009 I would have likely held Thanksgiving off if I had bid conservatively and a little smarter. That month I really hurt myself and that is the beauty of being a nerd. This journal has paid for itself and my quality of life is as good as COS will allow for my seniority.

So here is what I bid for:

In November we have 65 flight attendants is still a low number even though we had 64 in October. It hurts me too. Instead of being 39% I'm 44.6%. If you have flight attendants under you, you don't want them to transfer. Either way, I will likely hold Thanksgiving off. And I bid very, very, conservative this month as you can see in my ''Christmas tree''.