Written: January 13, 2020
Published: October 2021
Last Friday I didn’t keep any notes, but in filling in the blanks I believe it was a pretty sick pool party on Saturday. Sunday we went to the movies. Class is super chill, everyone gets along really well and it’s a pretty good time overall.
Monday night - back at the night shift again. Kinda nice sleeping in, and I prefer night shift to morning shifts. Getting home at midnight is hard though because I’m usually all wound up from the last run of the day which means I don’t go to bed until way later than I want to, but welcome to shift work.
Today’s runs went much better than Fridays, thankfully. I ran two feeder runs and two final runs today. Most of my feedback was positive, and I learned a little bit more, so I was happy about that. Now that I think about it, I think I jumped ahead in the rotation of my team-mates run… but he didn’t say anything to me so it must’ve been alright with him. On second thought, I don’t think I did. I did final, feeder, then feeder, final. At any rate, my teammate is a good guy, worked at the center for years so he knows his stuff but terminal world is totally new to him.
My second final run I had a good instructor who let me run, it wasn’t perfect but I felt like I practiced the techniques and concepts they’ve been teaching us and showing him I could apply them, so I liked that. The feed from my teammate was spot on which helped immensely. I got behind at one spot and broke out my wanna-be-N90 (that’s New York Approach, for my non-controller readers) phraseology which drops and omits certain works from clearances when you’re ultra-busy. I got scolded. Oh well, I still like my cowboy wanna-be N90 style. Think the RPOs liked it too, I sensed they were getting into the run with enthusiasm.
We got to do a proficiency run tonight that definitely didn’t go quite as well as I wanted… but I still got the class best (17 down with 0 sep losses and 0 errors. Several people were close on my tail with 17 down and 1 or 2 errors, which was what I got last time we ran I believe (may have been 18... can’t totally remember).
The suckiest part about that finals run is that the feeder was coming in from the computer, not a person. That can be good or bad, but a good human feeding you is far better than any computer. The computer is probably better than a bad human feeder. I was working at the very back of the “final box” or very close to it for most of the run and that didn’t make it happy, since I felt like I was always behind the power curve.
The “pro-run” is fun because you don’t have an instructor, so it gives you an opportunity to test what you’ve learned. Unfortunately, I’ve learned I’m just relying on my instinct and panic-vectoring and not counting like I’m supposed to, because I have to bang out my base-leg guys every damn time. It’ll get better, I’m sure. Also, we have skills checks (graded problems) tomorrow, so hopefully I magically do better then!