Black Clouds

As a person who goes to work a lot I will be the first to admit that the majority of the days/shifts I spend at work are pretty unremarkable. Things break and we get them fixed. So why is it that the only days that you remember are the days that the "black cloud" comes out and hovers over you. For example: One night when I was working midnight shift I was assigned two or three planes (I don't remember) and it was raining. My assigned planes were pretty clean on the white board. The white board is where all our planes for the night are written down and any work that is to be done on the  plane is written next to the AC number. The problem with the white board is that once the plane is terminated those nice "clean" planes become a nightmare of pilot write ups and items found during your walk around.

As usual when its raining two of my planes were arriving at almost the same time and both remoting out to Tango. The first one comes in and when I got up stairs the pilot was writing in the log book (not a good sign). He tells me that the FO's windshield wiper is inop, "has been the whole day." One of the long standing jokes in maintenance is that those windshield wipers only seem to break when its raining outside!!  I parked that plane and went back for my second one which had a forward position light out on it. Usually not a problem but like I said it was raining.  I knew from experience that changing a fwd position light in the rain means that, no matter how much rain gear you have on, you are going to get wet.

The following week the black cloud seemed to stay with me. Most of the gate calls I went on turned into huge events with delays and cancelled flights. I grounded a plane on Monday with a Weather Radar problem that I had never seem before. To my amazement I grounded another plane on the following Thursday with the same issue. PSEU lights, Up Lock sensors, Stab Out of Trim lights they all seemed to follow me all week long.

  The last thing was the aft lav issue. I had a gate call that was reported to be a lav switch intermittent. When I get up there I figure out pretty fast that the toilet itself has to be replaced. Of course it has been messed up for like three or four legs now so its full of stuff.  To make sure the problem was not the switch I had to take the cover off which flew out of my hand and directly into the toilet. To make matters worse when it hit the stuff in the toilet the stuff splashed up and went all over the front of my speed suit. Like a trooper I soldiered on and had to take half the wall apart, the cover for the shut off valve apart, the frozen in place mount bolts out.

About this time the FO decided to come to the back of the plane to argue with me about holding passenger boarding. Of course the new toilet had to fight me going back in.

I am headed back to work tomorrow and I hope that the black cloud is gone by then. The work is the same work that I do everyday but on those days when the black cloud is following you the everyday jobs turn into a grind.