Yesterday I was at my local Tescobuying a large bag of Purina dog food for my best pal and was in the checkout queue when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog.
So, since I’m of a playful disposition on impulse I told her, ‘no, I didn’t have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again’. I added that I probably shouldn’t because I ended up in hospital last time, but that I’d lost 2 stone before I woke up in intensive care with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.
I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in queue was now enthralled with my story).
Horrified, she asked me if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no, I stepped off a curb to sniff an Irish Setter’s arse and a car hit us both.
I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard.
I’m now banned from Tesco.
(With apologies to the original author for butchering his joke – arf, arf)
Not that I want to intrude on personal grief from history or anything… Not that we would wish history re-written, certainly not!
On a serious note, misery and grief isn’t something I would wish on anyone, even our Richard and certainly not his dependents.
It does make fascinating watching though to observe a self styled Sky Hero ‘get a little practice in.’
RB is no stranger to mishaps and disasters, but then – he has had plenty of practice.
On an upbeat note, if you sit in your armchair watching a computer screen you can avoid such things. At lest he gets out and does stuff… hopefully he will continue to do so. You can fool some of the people some of the time… but the reaper gets you in the end.
I have no idea who wrote this but I like it. It came off our pilot forum brought in from elsewhere ‘as an example of how appalling stereotypes can be how we today are much more broad minded and egalitarian’
Yes of course we are – it is a brave new world we live in isn’t it?
I thought you might like to read it. Don’t take it too seriously, its probably actionable by one of the stars within.
Those were the good ‘ole days.
Pilots back then were men that didn’t want to be women or girly men. Pilots all knew who Jimmy Doolittle was. Pilots drank coffee, whiskey, smoked cigars and didn’t wear digital watches. They carried their own suitcases and brain bags like the real men that they were. Pilots didn’t bend over into the crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so that some Gov’t agent could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or too much toothpaste.
Pilots did not go through the terminal impersonating a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars, and feed bags full of tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on the cell phone!!!
Being an Airline Captain was as good as being the King in a Mel Brooks movie. All the Stewardesses (aka. Flight Attendants) were young, attractive, single women that were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolution. They didn’t have to turn sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a sexual harassment claim. Junior Stewardesses shared a room and talked about men…. with no thoughts of substitution.
Passengers wore nice clothes and were polite, they could speak AND understand English. They didn’t speak gibberish or listen to loud gangsta rap on their IPods. They bathed and didn’t smell like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops. Children didn’t travel alone, commuting between trailer parks. There were no mongolhordes asking for a seatbelt extension or a Scotch and grapefruit juice cocktail with a twist.
If the Captain wanted to throw some offensive, ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a lawsuit or getting fired. Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there, after all it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast (run like a lizard on a hardwood floor). Economy cruise was something in the performance book, but no one knew why or where it was. When the clacker went off no one got all tight and scared because Boeing built it out of iron, nothing was going to fall off and that sound had the same effect on real pilots then as Viagra does now for those new age guys.
There was very little plastic and no composites on the airplanes or the Stewardesses’ pectoral regions. Airplanes and women had eye pleasing symmetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins, winglets, flow diverters, tatoos, rings in their nose, tongues and eyebrows. Airlines were run by men like C.R. Smith and Juan Trippe who had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew many of their employees by name and were lifetime airline employees themselves…not pseudo financiers and bean counters who flit from one occupation to another for a few bucks, a better parachute or a fancier title, while fervently believing that they are a class of beings unto themselves.
The sentiments displayed here are bittersweet and cut to the chase of conversations between airline employees aroud the world. Is the any real mileage in diluting the one ting that defines your company and sets it apart from others?
Andy, my colleague for my last trip promised to send me posters that he had on his room wall at University. They were an antidote to the nauseating motivational versions some had, and perhaps still have adorning their various office and den walls. I hope you enjoy them, I will feed them to you slowly….
