Good afternoon, everybody.
Secret Santa
M’Lynda, as she has sweetly done for a long time, is helping to facilitate our annual Secret Santa gift exchange in the A area. The deadline to sign up to participate is tomorrow.
If you’re interested in participating, please throw your initials on the sign-up sheet, which is located by our headset box, before then. If you won’t be in the building between now and then and want to participate, please let me or M’lynda know and we’ll add you to the list.
Trainees are welcome and encouraged to participate.
Bidding update
Damien and I met with management yesterday to adjudicate our 2024 AWS requests and finalize our schedule.
You can see the final schedule by clicking on this link.
Given all of the contentious discussions we had beforehand about AWS requests, I believed there was a wide range of possible outcomes. Overall, we got more AWS requests approved that I feared we would — but I did walk away wishing we could’ve gotten more done. I am glad that we were able to preserve the process we have, which helps both us and management.
They were more conservative with protecting the changeover portion of the shift than previous years, which resulted in fewer requests being approved.
If you have any specific questions about why your request didn’t get approved if it didn’t get approved, let me know and I’ll go through it with you.
Management told me to pass along to you that if you do want to work an AWS and didn’t get yours approved, you’re free to put in any 7- and 9-hour request each week and ask a supe to address it on a case-by-base basis.
New A area controllers
I waited for this person to get to ZSE and physically be in the A area before I said anything, but I want to offer a huge welcome to Aaron McMorran. I feel like we won the lottery that we get to have him in our area.
We’re also getting two additional new D-sides. The first one, Bryan Murphy, arrived this week. The second one arrives next week. Please go upstairs and introduce yourselves to them when you can.
Article 5 volunteers
Now that we’ve bid and know our schedules for 2024, I’m again here to solicit for Article 5 volunteers. We’ll need several over the course of the coming year. The ones with firm dates right now:
• A lab for a transferring CPC Jan. 22-Feb. 2.
• A lab for a stage-3 student and a transferring CPC, Feb. 5-April 5
•A lab for a transferring supe Feb. 12-March 7.
A couple of people have reached out previously, but please let me know if you’re interested in these specific three ones.
Other upcoming volunteer work
Our 2024 A area refresher is scheduled for this coming March (ironic considering we just finished with refresher). I need to find/cajole/convince/beg two people to teach it. Please let me know if you’re interested in being one of these people.
It seems ironic because we’re currently doing IST, but we’ll have another round of IST April 21-May 4. If you’re interested in volunteering for the cadre to teach it, please let me know. The cadre is behind taught Jan. 30-31 and Feb. 1-2 (you’d pick one of those two classes).
In solidarity,
Dan Rasmussen
801-860-3821