I am still hearing

A lot of shit in the news about Air Traffic Controllers, and towers having been cut back to the bone on personnel so that only one person runs things on night shifts, and I have my thoughts about that.

Way back in the day, I was in the Civil Air Patrol, and we got junketed out to an FAA control tower to learn what those people do. In Boston. In uniform. I hope we looked cute, who's to say....

It was like a honeycomb, mass activity, buzzing with people talking into headphones with their faces sort of lit up green from the glow of the radar screens they were monitoring. And we got assigned to guys and could ask questions in the pauses while they were were routing this immense amount of traffic in the skies. It was awesome.

Well, there was this other kid chattering, and I was trying so make sense of the screen and the blips... no numbers or anything, just blips... and saw something that jarred me. So I said, 'Excuse me, Sir, what is going on here??? And he said, 'Oh!'. Because to me it looked like the two blips were gonna collide.

And he was immediately on the headphone set and ordered one of the blips to descend something thousand feet, don't remember how many. But I DO remember us watching very tensely as the two blips crossed one another's paths, and kept going on in their respective directions. And remember the air traffic controller slumping in his chair in sheer relief.

And thought, 'I'd never want this job.... those are PEOPLE.... too creepy.'

The people who do those jobs enter a world of kinetic tension every day of the week, and one second's inattention might end up killing a LOT of people.

So where am I going with this? Reagan is still lauded for breaking the air traffic controller's union when they went out on strike, and in the Rethug revisionist history view of things, that was a good thing.

And in the Rethug plan of what the world needs, aka less regulation, the 'managers' took over, fucktards without a clue. And cut and cut on personnel until whaddaya know.... 'well this airport only has a couple of incoming and departure flights late nights, so we only need one controller in the tower.'

Now I'm not going to find an excuse for the people who fall asleep in the night, when their job is to be alert and handle any sudden thing that might happen. Lives are at stake. But I DO know that working night shifts when it is monotonous is deadly, even if you have slept enough during the day, and you go into an inattention or even sleep mode.

It is unconscionable.... and it seems, unhealthy. People who work those hours are way more prone to heart attacks, as recently reported on MSNBC news...

One should NEVER allow people in that position to do that sort of job alone. Evah...

Now there is lots of blame, and really mean jokes about the sleeping control tower people, and I don't think it fair based on my own experiences. I did swing shifts for twenty years, and sometimes was too wound up to sleep, and at other times drag-assed tired. It can be so draining, and is not 'natural'.

Switching from days to nights really did a number on me, and was doing twelve hour shifts. The first and especially the second nights were lethal. It was 'normal', and our union was shit for our branch of work.

So I have some sort of empathy for the 'miscreants', I do. Their working conditions suck, and the responsibility is really massive. I'm sure they have little mechanisms that they use, thinking they could rest out of massive boredom, when nothing is on the radar.

I would usually just sort of 'rest' between two and four a.m. And leave on the radio, just so it was barely heard. Sound carries in the night. And would doze, but the station would sound a bell on the hour, and I would hear it, and think, 'Ok, three a.m.' 'Ok, four a.m. Get up and finish your statistics chart, and get ready for the day.' This was allowed, by the way, and some nights were so busy, no chance, everything was interesting, so no dullness.

In all those years, I only had one night where I really 'went under', and into a deep sleep. And a regular guest came down the stairs in fuzzy slippers. Most used the elevator, and before resting, I would leave it on the top floor before cat-napping, and when anyone got in, it made such a noise, I was up like a shot. We had bells and alarms, and would be innerly attuned to everything.

But she sneaked up and touched me on the shoulder. I screamed, she screamed... we had a wonderful mutual fright. She just wanted me to order a taxi for the airport, and hadn't bothered to use the phone to call the desk.

And it was all, 'Oh, sorry, I'm so sorry!' And luckily, we had the same sense of humour, and ended up finding it funny. After that, whenever she would stay, and yes, she came back, if I were on night shifts, she would come down and ask 'Herr B. When are you getting up tomorrow?' And smile mischievously. And I would say 'When do you need me to be up?' And smile back just as mischievously. And I never let her down again.

And I never slept that deeply again, but then again, she wasn't an airplane carrying a couple of hundred people. I was afraid to even doze.

In another case, earlier, I was dozing. Listening to the radio low in the background, waiting for the news on the hour. And one fine morning at three or four a.m., the news guy came on to tell us that the Russians were invading us, and he was really panicked and incoherent.

Well, I shot off the couch yelling 'WHAA?''

As it turned out, the newscaster had been napping between his hourly stints, had had a bad dream, and hadn't shaken it before the broadcast. You wouldn't believe how many people heard it live and got scared out of their wits. Austrians never seem to really sleep.

Well, the newscaster got taken off the graveyard shift, but not fired, after scaring half the country. They gave health issues as an excuse.

I'm not advocating for anything here. Instead, trying to illuminate a problem I know well. Except.... I never had hundreds of people's lives in my hands like the air traffic controllers do, and to reduce a bee-hive to a lone bee buzzing around in a meadow without flowers and getting tired.... might not be wise managing.