the daily haystack
Let me tell you a bit about how some days go for me, Virginia Hankins.
Some days, I wake up at whatever strange time, wherever my strange travels take me, I workout, I grab a cup of coffee, maybe write a clever blog post that hundreds and thousands drool over, then I fly some cool peoples from Point A to Point B, approximately 5 times over, then I have a cup of tea, snuggle in with my pup and get a nice rounded 8 hours of sleep. Some days, I get a gem of a day like this and everything is sound at the end of the night, I hardly had to dig to find the beautiful turquoise stone on top.
Then 98.79% of the time this is how my day really goes;
I wake up, after hitting snooze on my eleventh alarm I had set, now running approximately an hour late. I scramble, stretch on the only pair of nylons I have left without a snag, pull on my slightly pressed (that's a lie, it was definitely what my dog slept on last night) uniform, grab 1,2,3, pieces of luggage and just like that I'm out the door. I stop for coffee, only to spill the whole cup on myself as I suavely walk out of the coffee shop, including the warm liquid now filling my black pumps. I drive to work, caffeine deprived and in a hurry. I try to stifle the coffee aroma with essential oils, now creating a horrific marriage of smells. I arrive to work only to be delayed by 4 hours. So, I sit.
I finally board my plane. On my third flight I have a sudden realization that I forgot my lunch pail, four days of meals prepped, made and now rotting in my car for two to six days. On my fourth flight, with two more to go, my "b" flight attendant and I begin to make plans to grab food when we land. I'm running through my head what I'll slip into when we get to the hotel--in horror, I'm stuttering in my thoughts to remember what pants I packed. Panic. I know what pants I intended on bringing. But, for once in my adult life, I did my laundry like an actual adult, only to leave my pants, my underwear and a spare bra, all in the dryer. Pants are semi a necessity if you plan on leaving your hotel. So I hear, at least.
Luckily, we get back tomorrow, I can run home and grab them before they call me out for another trip the next day.
We get in late, so all head straight away to our rooms. Luckily. In the morning I wake up to have three messages from Crew Scheduling. I have a change on my schedule. Oh, oh no. I got extended to a four day trip.I won't be going home.
I devise a plan. It was my own personal take on "the walk of shame", but it felt just about the same I imagine. I walked across the town to the Wal-O-Marto in just my pencil skirt, a sweatshirt I managed to have left in my pack and a pair of dusty white converse. I walked through Wal-Mart feeling oh-so-classy to find myself a quality pair of $10 jeans, a shirt and a few protein bars and off I went, pride bruised a bit, and head hiding under a baseball cap I bought to hide my bed head.
The trip went on to follow a similar pattern of almost forgetting my wallet in a coffee shop bathroom, leaving behind my phone charger in an airport terminal, buying lunch for the next day, and forgetting it on the shuttle back to the hotel...it was one of those 98.79% trips.
Not only was it clumsy, beautiful, merry in its ridiculousness, but it also was a crew scheduling masterpiece. I was scheduled originally for a day trip, only to be extended to a two day, to wake up on that two day to be out for two more days, to end on my third day with a call that I would be out for a total of six days, all of which were between five and six leg days. I switched crews five times. In that six days I switched from working PM trips, 2PM-1/2AM, to working AM's from day three to day six with wake ups at 3:30AM-5AM the next three days. And to top it all off three out of the six days I was lucky enough to run off of minimum rest times (for us this is ten hours, which includes time to/from the airport).
Some days, some days are Option B, where I really have to search to find the hidden turquoise gem in the day.
But even though Option B, of the two, is a bit more hectic, a bit more tiring, a bit overwhelming--that is now my normal. I have learned to function (heck, some days I jive and thrive on these days more than the latter) even though some days I would rather not. I have learned cherish the morning time I get to myself on PM trips, and the afternoons I get on AM trips...but, more so, it has made me absolutely cherish Option A. The trips where everything goes smoothly are wonderful, beautiful unicorn-esque trips...however, if you've noticed, those days are not the ones that end up with the good stories.
You see, something I'm learning in my ripe age of twenty three years on this earth, is that the most unique, the most treasured, the most told stories come from the days, trips, people, and places you least expected. It's the messiness of the day that makes the sunset a little more beautiful, because it was a day that was a little more vivid.
God sure does have a way of hiding gems in the haystack of unlikely.
