More of this to come I suspect.
Tales from the non flying side:
I have posted some interesting stories, job info, building expertise, from my files as an owner of a commercial concrete contracting company.
I have been doing this for 25 years now and had as many as 80 employees with a current crew of about 20 who have all been working with us for 15-20 years, which is great because we have good people who can get along and know what the hell they are doing and can basically do the work of a firm with 2 times as many employees. Everybody get s paid more and the owners make more with half the hassle.
However, this virus has been something else. Last spring (2020) we were really busy. Too busy, in fact. We had a bunch of jobs that were delayed and just started all at once. Things were tense with the virus, but we powered through and in a couple of months got back on plane with everything working like normal. We had adjusted to things and had a plan that everyone was cool with and nobody got Covid. Then, in the middle of the summer, all of a sudden, it was if I had a whole company of Conrad Doblers.
I had factions, cliques, and general anarchy. Guys who were teetotalers were showing up hungover. Employees were coming to my office to complain about other employees for no damned reason whatsoever. And nobody ever complains about employees to me. My complaints are more about staffing, execution, scheduling or equipment that doesn't work. Once a week I would have to sit and listen to somebody gripe about how they were somehow wronged by somebody else, and when upon further questioning by me, got to the bottom of it being no big deal. I guess they just wanted to be heard for some damned reason. But this went on for months.
To give you a clearer picture, we are kind of an old company employee age wise. All of us are over 45. These are guys that have been doing this a long time and are way past 20-30 something fits. Further, we were steadily busy and not subject to the malaise of little work which is just the worst.
Oddly enough, the phenomena vanished just as Covid hit its peak and we had several employees get it with a few bad cases, although nobody was officially hospitalized.
A few weeks ago I started to feel off and less enthusiastic about life, work, and stuff. At first I thought it was some kind of seasonal allergy thing, and then thought I might be having some kind of reaction to the vaccine. After a few weeks I think it is just things hitting me from the last 18 months. All I can say is I have been a jackass about everything. I have been a dick about contracts and change orders, and just a general pain in the ass to my clients. I'm not sure if it is the stress, or the realization that life is short and I don't need to put up with a bunch of crap.
I would have no problem taking a flight or complying with any airline rules at all, but if I did, I can see where a lot this is coming from. I think there is more pent up stress than we realize. Its easy to blame a bunch of yokels on a flight but I suspect this is eventually going to spill over across party lines (no CR), maybe not on flights, but in other places in strange and unforeseen ways.