MORE THAN 20 years ago, my working life revolved around a series of 80-minute naps, normally taken while wearing sunglasses. I got paid to sleep in a Captain's Chair that was bolted onto the floor of the pointed end of an aircraft. (Front left door shown at left). While taking my enforced snoozes, the polite bing-bong of SELCAL would normally awaken me and I would listen to the copilot report something about our flight. Since 20% of my Pacific journeys were aboard airevacs, some of the SELCAL traffic dealt with geographical positions of births and times of death. My life has changed since those high-altitude long-range intercontinental journeys but lately, I have to plan my evenings around 80-minute sleep periods, punctuated by shrill crying from another room where the youngest expresses her dissatisfaction with getting five big teeth all at once. I imagine her jaw feels like an episode from 24 where an interrogator extracted a perfectly good tooth from a reluctant candidate. The nightly SELCAL lifestyle actually isn't that bad. I have discovered that my body can hit REM within an hour and most of my colleagues don't seem to notice I'm motoring around with a sleep aggregate, not a full night's sleep.
Sent mail2blog using O2-EDGE Typepad service in Ireland while thinking about the retired Lockheed C-141 Starlifter.
