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Today was pretty cool. The morning was taken up mostly by a quarterly flight operations meeting that Jake and I got to go to. It was kind of like my classes that describe how the airline industry works, except not only faaar more interesting, but way more funny. There are a lot of good people here at AA. Man, they really hate Southwest! Mostly because of the fight over Dallas Love Field. SW has basically all the gates and I guess there was a law passed called the “Wright Amendment” that disrupted their monopoly and allowed a small number of American Eagle flights to get in. Of course, SW is throwing a hissy fit and there’s propaganda all over Dallas on both sides. Most of Dallas is owned by AA (It’s pretty obvious) but SW has a lot of space over by Love Field. Love Field is kind of like Chicago Midway in that it was the original airport, but they needed a bigger one so they built DFW similar to O’Hare. Some talks are even going about closing Love Field for noise and $, which AA is like “ok”. AA says that with SW having a monopoly at Love, and AA having one at DFW, it’s raising prices to get to Dallas and hurting the industry. AA isn’t looking too bad these days. They would have made a profit this year if it wasn’t for fuel costs (war). They still have the most airplanes and the most passengers in the world, and their MD-80’s alone would make them the 5th largest airline in the world. Wow! If the MD-80 didn’t suck so much that’d be more awesome. The rest of the day I sat around and waited to go home. No jumpseating this weekend. Should be next weekend.
Later in the day other interns and I went to see X-Men 3. It was okay in the crappy sort of way. It had a different director and instead of having character development and plot twists it had lots of cgi and things blowing up. A cliché end to an awesome and promising series. I guess the ending made it open for another sequel. We didn’t know to stick around past the credits. I hate it when they do that.
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Today started off with me wondering where my birth certificate was. I misplaced it when packing my stuff to bring to Dallas, so earlier in the week I was freaking out over the phone while my mom looked through all of my stuff and eventually found it. I’m supposed to have it by Friday, May 26. She mailed it certified mail to me on Friday and now almost 7 days later I didn’t have it. The tracking said it was sent back to her in Ohio. Oh boy useless now! So I went and talked to Lisa. She gave me an address to have it shipped directly to her and said have it by Thursday. Lucky! Without it I can’t use the full-motion flight simulators later in the internship. Alison was also worried because I accidentally dropped my phone on the floor at AA and left it there overnight, so I didn’t call her. She was worried that I had died. It wasn’t that long! But I understand she’s lonely being so far away from me. Spent the rest of the day updating the scripts for the international CBT ground schools. Not as fun as working with authorware and was pretty boring. At least time went by faster because I was working. I’m trying to reheat the Mexican food from went we went to the West End and I’m hoping it doesn’t kill me. X-Men comes out tomorrow and I don’t know if I’ll see it right away. I love the X-Men movies. I hope to god it doesn’t suck.
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I feel it is my obligation to myself to keep a journal during my internship with American Airlines this summer, 2006. I don’t need to keep an extremely detailed entry each day, but I don’t want any of my experiences to become lost in the vacuum of my mind. Today was a pretty boring day. My mentor, Rich, was in today and we talked a little, but he didn’t give me anything to do. I spent the whole time playing with the presentation template in Authorware, and converted my project from yesterday into the AA style. It worked except for the text input. I also spent some time in the CBT room looking at the training that is already set up. I got to go watch a presentation on how ATC centers work together during thunderstorms to route traffic. They were shooting a video for training and needed bodies in the room. That’s what interns are made for! Everyone in the program development office is really nice and it’s been pretty quiet so I’m enjoying it. I’m even lucky enough to have a window in my cubicle. I don’t like the cubicle so much since people can sneak up on me. Now I know why people have mirrors around their computers.
I beat Quake 4 today. Ending sucked. I didn’t even cheat! Not that it was a bad ending to the game, I just felt I was entitled to more. I suffered through a hell of a lot in the game and I wanted a cool ending. None of this “We have new orders” crap like it was all for nothing. Oh well.
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Today was a pretty good day all around. Jake and I got the rest of the Authorware presentation and after that we were pretty much turned loose to work with it. It’s kinda like powerpoint and VB put together, actually leaning towards VB. Since I have pretty good experience with VB, it came to me pretty easily and I had finished with the “how-to” book by the end of the day. This really impressed Wayne and I think Jake felt dumb. I tried to play it off like “oh I had a class in high school” to try and make him feel better but I can’t help it that I am good at programming. I want them to think of me as a pilot and not an IT guy, I guess. I could never live at my cubicle forever. If I ever couldn’t fly for medical reasons or something, I think this would be an awesome job though.
After work I tried to go to Fry’s, which I actually found today (day 3 of trying). Got to the one in Irving. Also found the Chipotle by accident! Anyways I was looking around and saw the Macbook for the first time. Being off the internet for two weeks has slowed down my tech news. Well I didn’t like it enough so I’ll wait for the 13” powerbook. When I tried to buy two power splitters and a flight yoke I was informed that they don’t take out of state checks. I got mad and left. Then I went to Wal-Mart in a bad mood. I hate going to Wal-Mart in a good mood so I was especially bitter today. Bought a desk for my computer and some other misc. crap. Oh! I also changed my T-Mobile plan to 600min and free nights/weekends. So now I’m in for another year, but hopefully not getting raped each day for talking to Alison. By the time I got home it was dark.
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Day one of the internship with American Airlines! I’m not really counting orientation because it was so damn boring and not interesting. Sat around and talked about alcohol policies and things like that. So anyways, it seems like almost everyone from the office is out this week. Don’t know why. I work with another intern from Embry-Riddle Prescott named Jake. Every time I tell people I’m from Kent State they are so amazed. I hope they will remember me and the school. There’s many people here from ER and Purdue and UND and the like. I’m glad that my decision to go to KSU still got me here. I’ve got to do well to reflect well on KSU. The more people know and respect KSU, the better it is for me and future grads. So a guy named Wayne from the program development office gave us a hell of a tour, and I mean that to say it was long and not so very interesting. We met like 50 people and I can hardly remember any of them. Hopefully I will have it by the end of the summer. I’m not good with names. I got to do a few things with Macromedia Authorware. Probably going to Whataburger after work.
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