Today is the first of six days of duty, and as expected, crew scheduling did not give me an assignment. I have learned that these six-day stretches are not the best, unless you want to sit at home waiting for the phone to ring! The best are three- or four-day stretches, but I couldn't rework my schedule this month to do that because I had already used too many days to go to NYC. So now it's time to face the consequences.
The company recently asked the flight attendants, especially the reserves (that's me), to consider taking June and/or July and/or August off as a COLA (company-ordered leave of absence) to help with our overstaffing situation. It would be at no pay, but we'd still get all our benefits except for vacation and sick day accrual. I thought and thought and thought about it, discussed it with Greg (he likes the additional bit of $), and thought and thought and thought about it some more.
The little extra bit of $ is nice, but it would also be nice to have the freedom to travel for a month, and to maybe spend some uninterrupted time at home getting all the files, finances, etc. organized! Which is something I did not do before I took the job. Also, with the cost of gasoline driving to/from Denver, it may be time to take a break and let the gas credit card cool off a bit.
The deadline for our requests is today at 9AM...so I went ahead and requested June off. If the June COLAs are filled, I then requested August, and then July (everything is done by seniority). The June schedules have already been distributed - I got a few days off for when Jen comes to Colorado, and a few days off to attend a wedding in Chicago. But I couldn't get a group of days long enough to make it worthwhile to fly to Virginia to go see my family. So that's what I hope to do.
We'll see what happens. Remember...it's all about Flexibility and Spontaneity!
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