Line Award and Reason Report: December 2012

I hope that when you logged into PBS to view your line this morning, you had an explosion of happiness. Like this:

This may take a while...

Well, let's hope that this gets done correctly. I don't want a bid-re-run like February '11. The time is 0600 MDT on the 19th. Nothing published yet. 






Bids are out.

December 2012: Is That Your Final Answer?

The Bid, December 2012.

Here we are. The moment of truth. As I am writing this it is just 12 hours away from November 17th, 9:00am MDT.  I am anxiously anticipating the 18th to see if my bid has done as well as I hope. I am curious for a number of reasons. The focal point of my bid is to see if I can use my bidding knowledge to somehow hold Christmas Day off. Subsequently, I am just as curious to see how my layers end up working. This is the most complex bid I have ever done. I have put a lot of thought and effort into it (could you tell?). Usually, I preach "KISS" (Keep it simple, stupid) but in this case I am a wee bit desperate and my bid is anything but simple. Come the 18th, we will know if my mad-scientist bidding has paid off or shot me in the foot. Here is crossing my fingers that it works out well!

Juniority, December 2012

I have found the Juniority posts incredibly interesting. Hopefully, you will too.  Every once in a blue moon you'll see management do something similar, but it isn't near enough in my opinion. You see, each month is completely different from the previous. The best way to show that is through the graphs that I have made. I have simply plugged the numbers of the PBS bid info page into a spreadsheet. It's very easy, but the weight of graphs is hard to express, otherwise.

Building the initial spreadsheet was a bit time consuming. It also requires a small learning curve and I admit I'm slowly growing used to the spreadsheets. Also haven't done all of the graphs that I would like, but this illustration speaks for itself. Compare it to last month, November Juniority.

December 2012: How to Bid for a Holiday

Don't attend your own funeral, bid wisely.

The title of this post is self explanatory. There are lots of flight attendants who don't know how to bid to begin with but when it comes to a holiday month, things get crazy for everyone (unless you have been awarded vacation)! There aren't many flight attendants who consider all the possibilities, I suggest you do. Several times I have seen bids where a flight attendant has just thrown in some days off and called it good. That's a problem... but it can be an advantage to me or junior folks if the senior people bid poorly! I am even reluctant to talk about this because, obviously senior folks that bid poorly gives the junior folks in a domicile (like me) an advantage. However, I should address this problem because that's what I do on this blog. I educate (or at least blog about it) so someone can educate themselves. Also, I thought I would explain some of the strategies I employ during a holiday month.

December 2012

Welcome to the 100th post here on the PBS Journal. It is fitting that this 100th post is on the eve of the most important and dynamic bid I have seen. December is always an enigma as bidding goes. Throw in flying for five major partners, contract negotiations, and shifting domicile flying and this is nothing less than science. Fortunately, for us as crew members, we simple bid for what our domicile is given. Hopefully the trips you are bidding for are good.

Hopefully there aren't many trips over Christmas, either! There are bound to be some, so a little math will do you lots of good in obtaining a sound idea of what you're faced with. In COS, it ain't pretty. 28 trips (including FA and FF) fall on or over Christmas Day. The problem is that there is only 63 bidding flight attendants in COS. If you divide 28 in 63 that is 44%. So, regardless of seniority, there will be 44% of COS flight attendants working on Christmas day. Turns out that we've lost four junior flight attendants in COS which means that our domicile seniority just got worse. I'm at 47.6% now. Funny enough, last month I was highly considering transferring out of COS. I thought I'd wait until after the new year. I am kicking myself for not getting out of dodge now. Frankly, I think its pathetic that COS will utilize nearly half its flight attendants for flying on Christmas day. November seemed reasonable. There were 16 trips that fell on or over Thanksgiving. For November in COS, that was 25% of flight attendants that would work Thanksgiving Day.

This will be my son's first Christmas, my daughter's fourth. That is what makes this the most important bid I have done. I know the industry well enough to know that there are trips on holidays, but I also know that at SkyWest after 7 holidays, I should be senior enough to hold holidays off. Well, that isn't the case this go around. So, Hopefully my bidding will save me. Skedplus won't, that's for sure.

Good luck to you.

... To Be Continued.