Broken Airplanes Suck

So, there's a big old snowstorm raging on the East Coast, dumping bucketload of white shit all over the place, including, of course, the airport.

Airplanes + lots of snow on runways = -EV.

Except, that wasn't the problem. In the face of all this crappy weather, we couldn't fly a plane if we wanted to, because they all seemed to BREAK!

See, back in the day, if something simple and non-life threatening stopped working on an airplane, the pilot would simply take note of the problem and work around it, if he even noticed there was a problem. After all, a .1 degree difference in deflection between the two wing ailerons is insignificant and undetectable to any pilot who isn't Chuck Yeager.

Now-a-days, computers run everything, including, it appears, pilots. Boot up the airplane, and it goes through it's little checklist of things to check. It gets to "aileron continuity" blah whatever, and whoa, there's a .1 degree disagreement in deflection. It then proceeds to litter the crew alerting systems will all sorts of red warnings and crap talking about "umm, ailerons are porked up, dude. This is, you know, bad or something". Of course, this all happens in places we don't have maintenance. Anyway, the thought process of a modern jetliner pilot goes something along the lines of:

Turn on airplane, get Microsoft boot up sound
|
\/
Red shit on screen
|
\/
call someone to make it go away

Now, don't get me wrong. I trust every pilot flying the line for our airline with my life, as they trust my judgment with theirs, but man, sometimes they totally lose the forest for the trees. If they were in the air and things went bad, they're damn good at getting themselves and, subsequently, everyone else, down alive. Put them on the ground though, and their brain turns to goo.

Okay, enough job bitching. Thought I'd make a leisurely day of it and logged onto UB for some .25/.50 goodness. After a couple of days stabbing around at this, I've noticed that the bit/twobit games at UB are infinitely tighter then the .50/1 games on Party. I guess the crazies all hang out at the .01/.02 tables at UB. This could be a good thing. Another thing I like about the UB interface is, you can crunch the tables down into "mini-tables" and stack multiple tables on top of each other. This is awesome as I can watch all of the action on both tables without anything covered up! Combined with the faster pace the UB games seem to go at, and I'm a happy camper...

But I still love the action on the Party tables. Party games are MUCH looser and, potentially, much more profitable. Though UB is there for the times where I don't want to sweat variance or when Party decided they're going to do some unscheduled server shutdowns, I just can't leave the trout stream that is Party.

More tomorrow. I must get horizontal. Reveille is at 03:45.

Morning shift well and truly sucks ass.