The Month in Review: Part 2.

This edition of my month comes to you from a body full of too much coffee and too little food.

PART TWO: Work.

I'll try to make this fairly short and fairly sweet. After all, there's only so much to be said about one's job. You go to work, you do what needs to be done, and you go home.
What needs to be done, you ask? Well here's a quick little recap of my source of employment:
I work for a nice little company by the name of Regional Elite Airline Services. The company itself is owned by Delta Airlines. While on the job, I occasionally toss luggage and direct planes in their respective gates, but my primary job is catering. No, I don't serve gourmet dishes to passengers who pay far too much for their food. Instead I haul all the necessities up to the cabin of the plane between flights: soda, juice, cookies, pretzels, peanuts, ice, water, liquor, and whatever else a flight attendant may decide he/she needs to satisfy the passengers for the duration of the flight. I run up and down the stairs to the jet bridge, in and out of the planes, usually carrying anywhere from 10 to 80 pounds of product to the galley.
To put things into perspective:
The most I have had to carry consisted of; 2 atlases of soda/juice, 6 bottles of water, a variety of snacks, 3 bags of ice, and a few other items.
1 atlas of soda/juice is 40 cans. 1 can weighs approximately .875 pounds. 2 atlases is 80 cans, or 70 pounds, plus the weight of the physical container that is the atlas, so we'll say 75 pounds. 1 liter of water is 2.2 pounds. 6 bottles? we'll say 13 pounds. Snacks and ice? Add another 10 to 15 pounds, and with the final odds and ends, we'll tack on 5 more. The grand total of the most needy plane I've catered? About 108 pounds. Needless to say, the combination of my ego and the fact that I had only 18 minutes between grabbing the flight attendant's grocery list and needing the plane out of the gate, I brought everything up in one trip. With atlas on top of atlas on top of milk-crate full of water, ice, and dry goods all balanced by my chin, carried up a steep flight of icy stairs, it was nearly the death of me, quite literally. On the final step I nearly lost balance and fell backwards down the stairs, but luckily caught myself on the railing of the jet bridge stairs.


That flight attendant better be grateful.


One last tidbit about my time working at the airport, and then I'll let you be on your way.
On a normal week's schedule, I spend my weekend nights out on the tarmac: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday you'll find me out catering planes from 5:15 PM to 10:15 PM, or 11:15PM for Sundays. Sunday, December 12th was not a normal schedule.
Sunday, December 12th was the day that I worked a 20.25 hour shift.
I woke up at 3:00 AM after attending a concert the night before at First Avenue (Your Downtown Danceteria) in order to be to the airport and clocked in by 5:30. Being the day after the 17 inch snow storm, I spent the first three hours of my shift snowed in. The water truck, which I was to use that day, was stuck in a garage, with waist-high snow drifts blocking the doors. When it was finally time to go out and do my job, I drove to gate Charlie 16, hooked the hose up to the belly of the CRJ 700, and began to pump the water into the stomach of the plane. After what seemed like far too long to fill the tank, I went to remove the hose from the plane. Lo and behold, the hose and plane were helplessly connected by a nice thick coating of ice. Unable to drive anywhere, I called up my supervisor, who brought a thermos full of steaming-hot water to the plane, freeing my poor truck from a helpless bond with the aircraft.
Assuming the same would happen with any attempt to fill a plane, my duties were relinquished as water truck, and I sat in the break room for hours until shift number two for the day was to start at 5.
I don't remember much of the second half of my shift, as I think fatigue set in around 4, and memory was first to go.
Come 11:15, it was time for me to head home for the night and prepare for school the next morning. However, come 11:15, it was time to ask for volunteers to stay and drain any late planes that arrived that night. And so myself, my elder brother, and one co-worker stayed late, waiting for any planes to land and take refuge for the night, draining the water so as to not freeze up the pipes overnight. We stayed and we drained every single plane on the Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie concourses.
I clocked out at 1:45 AM. Twenty and one quarter hours after I clocked in. I was cold, I was grumpy, I was tired.

I was thankful for a warm bed to come home to.

The Month in Review: Part 1.

December 2010. The month of the most snowfall in Minneapolis.

EVER.

Needless to say, December has been busy. What with finals and the holidays and work and shoveling out 34 inches of snow from my driveway and sidewalks and porches, that really leaves little time for much else, doesn't it?
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
So I've gotten a little lazy with updating you on my life as of recent, but hey, I made it two whole posts before the laziness set in, didn't I? Well to make up for it, I'm going to binge-blog and try to sum up my entire month in a matter of 3, 4, or 5 posts, depending on my mood.

PART ONE: Snow.

There's a reason some call it Minnesnowta, and this past month has reflected our proud title well. With a blanket of white falling from the sky at least once a week, mother nature was able to out-do herself by 6 inches this year, compared to a previous record of 28 inches of white, powdery goodness.
On the bright side, Minneapolis has a fairly effective setup for snow removal. Somewhere in the hierarchical structure for winter weather, a person in power (let's call them the Snow Czar) decides whether or not an accumulation of snow in a single storm is enough to declare a "snow emergency," in which the city sends out an army of plows to makes its way down the 1,000+ miles worth of city street in hopes of clearing the snow and making driving less of a hazard. Once a snow emergency is declared, you've got what seems like 30 seconds to get your car to where it needs to be, and if you don't get it out of the way by the time the plows are ready to come through, you can make your way down to the impound lot to pick your car up. In other words, if you're not on top off things during a snowstorm, you're SOL.
To make things better, a snow emergency consists of three days: each with different parking restrictions. In short, I'm extremely thankful for my garage stall.
On top of having the most snow physically fall from the sky this month, it was also the month of the most snow emergencies declared in the history of Minneapolis; five of 'em. In four weeks. After the December 10th snowstorm, there were actually two snow emergencies declared to clear the 17 inches of snow from the streets that had fallen in one day. That's six days worth of emergency. Oh, and you can't forget about the snow emergency that was declared ON CHRISTMAS.

"Welcome home, Mrs. Smith. Where's your car, you ask? Check the impound lot."

Man, if Minnesota is good for one thing, it's teaching one to appreciate springtime.