We’ve been busy lately, so sorry for the lack of updates. Work has been busy the last three nights with thunderstorms, late flights, and helping balance the workload for us midnight guys. As you might already know, the Dispatch office divides up the work by desk, with each desk responsible for specific city-pairs (ex. all flights from Dallas to Houston or Orlando to Baltimore). The midnight guys take over all flights for 2-4 different desks in the evening, monitoring them until they land, and planning all departures for 2-4 different desks the following morning through a given time, such as 830c. To accommodate growth, we add one or two desks to the office each year. To balance out the workload when we add a new desk, we shift city-pairs among the regular desks and change which desks the midnight guys relieve in the evening and release in the morning. In designing a midnight “desk”, my colleagues and I consider many factors, including the relative difficulty of each geographical area (west coast flights are generally easier due to better weather), the number of different airports we have to track, the number of flights to plan, and how many flights depart before the midnight guy leaves in the morning. There’s no perfectly even way to divide up the work, but I think we’ve come up with a decent solution. We’ll see how it works starting in February. I keep volunteering to help with these changes because I like puzzles, although it’s a bit daunting to know that people are unhappy if you provide the wrong answer. =)

Jenny and I had a very nice getaway to the Gaylord last weekend, complete with two delicious meals at the Riverwalk Cafe, a very cold but very beautiful trip through ICE (sorry I don’t have any pics – I was afraid the camera would break at 5 degrees!), a beautiful and comfortable room, nice staff, and plenty to see. I’m on a 12-day stretch at work after picking up a few shifts for a friend of mine whose stepdad is having surgery. We took Christmas down, and now we’re trying to clean out our rented garage so we can quit renting it. Anyone looking for a large legal-size filing cabinet, or have a good place to store a nice gas grill for a while?

Last night we had our second CARES pizza party and game night, which was a lot of fun. No one really played any board games, but we had a decent crowd, and many people stuck around to hang out for a bit. Pizza Hut accidentally shorted us a couple of pizzas, but it turned out that our advertising signs had blown over, and attendance was lower than expected. It’s always cool to see how God can work things out.