I was a United Summer Intern
Dec 6, 2010, 10:29 pm
#121
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Join Date: Nov 2010
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Posts: 604
Thanks. It's finals season, so I've been focused on classwork. And on canceling a not-insubstantial trip to Vegas booked through Expedia.ca without paying airline or Expedia cancelation fees. It's a headache, but I'm getting somewhere.
Dec 9, 2010, 12:58 pm
#122
Join Date: Jan 2010
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Posts: 29
Well done so far. Can't wait for more.
Dec 16, 2010, 6:08 am
#123
Original Poster
Join Date: Nov 2010
Programs: UA Premier Platinum, DL Platinum
Posts: 604
Pass & I.D., or The Pizza Run
John handed me a tennis trophy.
“Should’a, Would’a, Did.” The slogan, typed on a folded of paper, had been taped onto the front of it.
‘This is for Eze,” John announced, “in honor of two – two – trips in his first ten days, which bets Joan’s record by eighteen months.”
It was an honor. The office clapped. I had apparently traveled more in my first two weeks than the average member of the office did in three months, which I took as less a credit to me than a disgrace to them. That statistic came up during the award presentation, at the end of our weekly Monday Morning Meeting, in which the five members of the staff and I would discuss each of our projects for the week, note upcoming events, report any valuable industry and company news, and reassure Lynn that her 20-something daughter still had time to marry.
“I’m just… I don’t know,” Lynn would say, shaking her head. “I want grandkids.”
“I feel your pain,” Bill once replied. “I spent three months on a waitlist for an Acura.”
Lynn didn’t find this funny.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Buddy, you and me are in the same industry,” the caller said, referring to my office’s specific function within the United. “Look, I just need a contact, VIP services or something, who’ll figure this out.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I told him. “I really don’t have someone to give you.”
“Just a name.”
“I really don’t have access to a name.”
“C’mon! Who is this? What’s your name?”
“Ezefllying,” I offered.
“What’s your organizational make-up? You know your company!”
“Actually, sir,” I replied, dipping into that reactionary Manhattan accent I’d genetically inherited, the one I tend only to use in New York delis and Penn Station, “I don’t.”
“Who’s your supervisor?”
“Joan. Would you like to speak with her?” I held back the phone.
“Yes!” he belted, on queue.
I put the man on hold and went searching for my boss.
“I have a present for you,” I told her.
She briefly smiled curiously before giving me the skeptic’s squint.
“Someone would like to speak with you. Line Two.” I began walking off but turned around. “He says that he’s very important.”
Joan groaned. She had fantastic intuition.
A good number of people have the phone numbers to United departments, often as a product of having, at some point, done work for or with them or met them at a conference or through professional contacts. In this case, someone at a different firm with a job description similar to our directors’ had been trying to change a reward ticket at the airport and was denied his preferred dates due to capacity controls. He wanted someone to fix this, and so, armed with our number, he had called me, woefully unaware that I (a) was the last person capable of helping him, and (b) took poorly to being called “buddy” aggressively.
Joan walked over.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We had a wonderful chat.”
“Hmm?”
“I told him how deeply I understood his concerns.”
“And?”
“Gave him moral reassurance.”
I looked at her blankly.
“You need to finesse, finesse these things.” She told me sardonically. “You’re just not… a woman.”
Joan was right.
“Joan!” a distressed Bill called out from the kitchen. “Someone stole the Pepsis.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“You’ll have so much fun!” Lynn couldn’t contain herself. Tomorrow was the “field trip,” my drive to the airport to meet with the man who would be my supervisor during my month there. The real purpose of the trip was to fill out the necessary paperwork and submit the necessary fingerprints to receive access to the sterile areas of the airport, including, I’d been told, pre-Customs territory, without a boarding pass. After an hour there, I’d return to the office, where I was slated to work for the rest of the week and then after my month-long stint at the hub.
Lynn had worked check-in at the hub for two decades and loved it. The warm interactions with excited passengers, the chance to “steal” another airline’s paper-ticket and win revenue for United, the thrill of such close proximity to international flights…. Hearing her describe her understanding of the air-travel experience, I was glad she hadn’t been on a plane in a year. It might have crushed her.
“Got the briefing?” a passing Claire interrupted, in reference to the large presentation I’d been researching and drafting on her behalf. I did, and I mention that here to imply that I was, rather frequently, useful. It has no relevance to the rest of this entry.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I opted for short-term parking and briskly marched inside, trying to retroactively force my tie into a better-dimpled half-Windsor. I’d seen Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia on CNN the week before and decided that I, too, could one day tie a tie as well as America’s leadership.
Scott, the man who would officially be supervising me at the airport, was waiting.
“Hello,” I said, “I’m Ezefllying.”
“Scott,” he said, shaking my hand and running through the standard greetings. “How was your flight?”
“I drove,” I told him. He stared at me, astonished.
“I’m working downtown.” An understanding of the situation dawned on him.
“I forgot people still used cars,” he said, smiling. “It’s either the plane or the bus.”
In twelve years at United, Scott couldn’t recall meeting an employee of a non-airport department who’d arrived for business without first exiting the sterile zone.
We walked from the downstairs airport entrance through the baggage claim area to a set of white double-doors I’d never before noticed. Above the doors was a small hanging sign: PASS & I.D. He held one door open for me and looked inside.
“This’ll be fun,” he said, and looked at me. I walked in. A representative cross-section of the airport staff had appeared in a showing of Waiting for Godot, and we were about to join them. There were baggage handlers, gate agents, the ethnic Ethiopians who run the parking garage. Everyone was there, watching HLN’s blaring recap of the Michael Jackson-doctor-malpractice-suit verdict and wondering, if they still remembered why they were there, when they might get the airport-issue photo identification necessary to work gate-side.
“I,” Scott said, tauntingly, “brought a candy bar.”
After fifteen or twenty minutes, my name was called, and Scott and I walked from the waiting room into what looked like a large reception desk and administration office for a doctor. The man behind the desk asked my to submit a formal company request for security-clearance privileges and my identification for initial processing. I had filled out the paperwork, declaring, among other things, that I had never been convicted of any of a series of given felonies, including hijacking and lewd exposure, and turned this in as well.
My documents were taken and I was sent to “Station Two,” a seat facing what looked like a webcam on a desk within the gated-off area of the office (one needed to unlatch a small sliding-bar lock at low waist level to get in). A female member of the airport’s Pass & I.D. staff told me to smile and took a photo from her computer. She looked at it.
“Very good,” she said, marveling. “You very… businesslike. Good look.” She showed me. I, in my suit and tie, probably looked out of place in the much more work-slacks-and-uniforms airport environment, but the photo at least came out blandly enough not to stand out or attracted the bemused attention of a co-worker.
The man at the front counter called me over as I left the gated area, handing me my identification and telling me that the airline would contact me “if my pass was approved.”
“When could I be looking at getting it?” I asked.
“They’re quick,” he told me.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott and I walked to the office of the C.B.P.
“We’re closed,” said an agent staring at his P.C., his “U.S. Customs and Border Patrol” badge proudly displayed on his short-sleeved navy blue button-down.
“Closed?” Scott asked. It was Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.
“Closed Wednesdays,” the agent told us. “Open Monday and Tuesday and Thursday and Friday between nine and twelve for clearance applications.”
“The clearance is filled out,” Scott argued. “We just need to submit it.”
“We’re closed,” said the agent. “Tomorrow.”
Scott and I walked out of the office as another agent walked in. We’d been foiled in our efforts to submit a double-sized, single-paged request for a Customs seal, a small image of the C.B.P. logo printed on one’s airport-issued I.D. The seal represents federal approval for the bearer to work and freely enter and exit pre-Customs areas of the airport, including the corridors en route to the Customs facility aircraft waiting to depart for or having just arrived from foreign cities. The airport’s C.B.P. office, while otherwise open, was closed to Customs-seal-request submissions.
“Just come back tomorrow,” Scott told me, forgetting the distance between the downtown office and the airport. “This should be easy.”
“Should’a, Would’a, Did.” The slogan, typed on a folded of paper, had been taped onto the front of it.
‘This is for Eze,” John announced, “in honor of two – two – trips in his first ten days, which bets Joan’s record by eighteen months.”
It was an honor. The office clapped. I had apparently traveled more in my first two weeks than the average member of the office did in three months, which I took as less a credit to me than a disgrace to them. That statistic came up during the award presentation, at the end of our weekly Monday Morning Meeting, in which the five members of the staff and I would discuss each of our projects for the week, note upcoming events, report any valuable industry and company news, and reassure Lynn that her 20-something daughter still had time to marry.
“I’m just… I don’t know,” Lynn would say, shaking her head. “I want grandkids.”
“I feel your pain,” Bill once replied. “I spent three months on a waitlist for an Acura.”
Lynn didn’t find this funny.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Buddy, you and me are in the same industry,” the caller said, referring to my office’s specific function within the United. “Look, I just need a contact, VIP services or something, who’ll figure this out.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I told him. “I really don’t have someone to give you.”
“Just a name.”
“I really don’t have access to a name.”
“C’mon! Who is this? What’s your name?”
“Ezefllying,” I offered.
“What’s your organizational make-up? You know your company!”
“Actually, sir,” I replied, dipping into that reactionary Manhattan accent I’d genetically inherited, the one I tend only to use in New York delis and Penn Station, “I don’t.”
“Who’s your supervisor?”
“Joan. Would you like to speak with her?” I held back the phone.
“Yes!” he belted, on queue.
I put the man on hold and went searching for my boss.
“I have a present for you,” I told her.
She briefly smiled curiously before giving me the skeptic’s squint.
“Someone would like to speak with you. Line Two.” I began walking off but turned around. “He says that he’s very important.”
Joan groaned. She had fantastic intuition.
A good number of people have the phone numbers to United departments, often as a product of having, at some point, done work for or with them or met them at a conference or through professional contacts. In this case, someone at a different firm with a job description similar to our directors’ had been trying to change a reward ticket at the airport and was denied his preferred dates due to capacity controls. He wanted someone to fix this, and so, armed with our number, he had called me, woefully unaware that I (a) was the last person capable of helping him, and (b) took poorly to being called “buddy” aggressively.
Joan walked over.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We had a wonderful chat.”
“Hmm?”
“I told him how deeply I understood his concerns.”
“And?”
“Gave him moral reassurance.”
I looked at her blankly.
“You need to finesse, finesse these things.” She told me sardonically. “You’re just not… a woman.”
Joan was right.
“Joan!” a distressed Bill called out from the kitchen. “Someone stole the Pepsis.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“You’ll have so much fun!” Lynn couldn’t contain herself. Tomorrow was the “field trip,” my drive to the airport to meet with the man who would be my supervisor during my month there. The real purpose of the trip was to fill out the necessary paperwork and submit the necessary fingerprints to receive access to the sterile areas of the airport, including, I’d been told, pre-Customs territory, without a boarding pass. After an hour there, I’d return to the office, where I was slated to work for the rest of the week and then after my month-long stint at the hub.
Lynn had worked check-in at the hub for two decades and loved it. The warm interactions with excited passengers, the chance to “steal” another airline’s paper-ticket and win revenue for United, the thrill of such close proximity to international flights…. Hearing her describe her understanding of the air-travel experience, I was glad she hadn’t been on a plane in a year. It might have crushed her.
“Got the briefing?” a passing Claire interrupted, in reference to the large presentation I’d been researching and drafting on her behalf. I did, and I mention that here to imply that I was, rather frequently, useful. It has no relevance to the rest of this entry.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I opted for short-term parking and briskly marched inside, trying to retroactively force my tie into a better-dimpled half-Windsor. I’d seen Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia on CNN the week before and decided that I, too, could one day tie a tie as well as America’s leadership.
Scott, the man who would officially be supervising me at the airport, was waiting.
“Hello,” I said, “I’m Ezefllying.”
“Scott,” he said, shaking my hand and running through the standard greetings. “How was your flight?”
“I drove,” I told him. He stared at me, astonished.
“I’m working downtown.” An understanding of the situation dawned on him.
“I forgot people still used cars,” he said, smiling. “It’s either the plane or the bus.”
In twelve years at United, Scott couldn’t recall meeting an employee of a non-airport department who’d arrived for business without first exiting the sterile zone.
We walked from the downstairs airport entrance through the baggage claim area to a set of white double-doors I’d never before noticed. Above the doors was a small hanging sign: PASS & I.D. He held one door open for me and looked inside.
“This’ll be fun,” he said, and looked at me. I walked in. A representative cross-section of the airport staff had appeared in a showing of Waiting for Godot, and we were about to join them. There were baggage handlers, gate agents, the ethnic Ethiopians who run the parking garage. Everyone was there, watching HLN’s blaring recap of the Michael Jackson-doctor-malpractice-suit verdict and wondering, if they still remembered why they were there, when they might get the airport-issue photo identification necessary to work gate-side.
“I,” Scott said, tauntingly, “brought a candy bar.”
After fifteen or twenty minutes, my name was called, and Scott and I walked from the waiting room into what looked like a large reception desk and administration office for a doctor. The man behind the desk asked my to submit a formal company request for security-clearance privileges and my identification for initial processing. I had filled out the paperwork, declaring, among other things, that I had never been convicted of any of a series of given felonies, including hijacking and lewd exposure, and turned this in as well.
My documents were taken and I was sent to “Station Two,” a seat facing what looked like a webcam on a desk within the gated-off area of the office (one needed to unlatch a small sliding-bar lock at low waist level to get in). A female member of the airport’s Pass & I.D. staff told me to smile and took a photo from her computer. She looked at it.
“Very good,” she said, marveling. “You very… businesslike. Good look.” She showed me. I, in my suit and tie, probably looked out of place in the much more work-slacks-and-uniforms airport environment, but the photo at least came out blandly enough not to stand out or attracted the bemused attention of a co-worker.
The man at the front counter called me over as I left the gated area, handing me my identification and telling me that the airline would contact me “if my pass was approved.”
“When could I be looking at getting it?” I asked.
“They’re quick,” he told me.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott and I walked to the office of the C.B.P.
“We’re closed,” said an agent staring at his P.C., his “U.S. Customs and Border Patrol” badge proudly displayed on his short-sleeved navy blue button-down.
“Closed?” Scott asked. It was Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.
“Closed Wednesdays,” the agent told us. “Open Monday and Tuesday and Thursday and Friday between nine and twelve for clearance applications.”
“The clearance is filled out,” Scott argued. “We just need to submit it.”
“We’re closed,” said the agent. “Tomorrow.”
Scott and I walked out of the office as another agent walked in. We’d been foiled in our efforts to submit a double-sized, single-paged request for a Customs seal, a small image of the C.B.P. logo printed on one’s airport-issued I.D. The seal represents federal approval for the bearer to work and freely enter and exit pre-Customs areas of the airport, including the corridors en route to the Customs facility aircraft waiting to depart for or having just arrived from foreign cities. The airport’s C.B.P. office, while otherwise open, was closed to Customs-seal-request submissions.
“Just come back tomorrow,” Scott told me, forgetting the distance between the downtown office and the airport. “This should be easy.”
Last edited by ezefllying; Feb 14, 2011 at 1:45 am Reason: William C. Macy doesn't exist, or at least doesn't act.
Dec 16, 2010, 6:25 am
#124
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Nov 2007
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Love it. ^
Thanks for the laughs this morning. You need to think seriously about a writing career, starting with a book about your summer internship. You really have a gift.
Thanks for the laughs this morning. You need to think seriously about a writing career, starting with a book about your summer internship. You really have a gift.
Dec 16, 2010, 8:06 am
#125
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Don't know....
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Great reading. Keep them coming!^
Dec 16, 2010, 9:46 am
#126
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Washington D.C.
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Posts: 478
"...that I had never been convicted of any of a series of given felonies, including...lewd exposure."
Are you sure you're a college student?
Are you sure you're a college student?
Dec 16, 2010, 10:25 am
#127
Original Poster
Join Date: Nov 2010
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Posts: 604
Dec 16, 2010, 10:27 am
#128
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Northeast Kansas | Colorado Native
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Dec 16, 2010, 11:31 am
#129
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 145
beats my day-trip to DEN to show a three year old the dinosaur museum, but probably can't catch my friend's SFO-ORD-SFO saturday because he was watching his son and they had good movies in both directions that month
Dec 16, 2010, 12:02 pm
#130
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: SFO
Programs: UA, DL,
Posts: 18
If this was a movie, I would go see it as well ^
Dec 16, 2010, 12:57 pm
#131
Join Date: Jul 2007
Programs: UA 1K MM, Alaska MVP Gold 75K, AA PLT
Posts: 1,082
Love it!!!
It's like you're doing mileage runs without the benefit of collecting status or miles 
Keep 'em coming!!
KH
Keep 'em coming!!
KH
Dec 16, 2010, 2:51 pm
#132
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Pennsylvania
Programs: US Silver, HHonors Silver
Posts: 187
Just stumbled on this thread and love it! Great writing and I can't wait to read the next installment.
Dec 16, 2010, 3:09 pm
#133
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Posts: 776
Dec 16, 2010, 3:10 pm
#134
FlyerTalk Evangelist
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Posts: 21,687
Dec 16, 2010, 3:46 pm
#135
Join Date: Dec 2008
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After every installment, I get the feeling we're watching the birth of the next Dave Berry, Erma Bombeck (insert your favorite daily life humorist here)...
Regardless of what you choose to do as your initial career, please do us all a favor and keep a diary. Someday you may want to make a chance, and we don't want you forgetting a single anecdote with the passage of time along the way!
Regardless of what you choose to do as your initial career, please do us all a favor and keep a diary. Someday you may want to make a chance, and we don't want you forgetting a single anecdote with the passage of time along the way!