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LIVE FROM DALLAS – 6/14/12
Well today was one of the days we had all been waiting for – scheduling and payroll! We spent hours learning about how to navigate through CWA. Many of us had already mastered the art of trip trading Yes, we all start flying next week and aren’t necessarily happy with the trip we got so we have been learning on our breaks how to swap with open time. Many have been successful, some have not. After today, we had far more knowledge of what the system here can do. Imagine you’re a commuter (as most of us will be) who lives in ATL and works in BWI and the last leg on your trip is ATL-BWI. If you can find a fellow commuter who wants to take that last leg, you can swap in the jetway! You don’t have to hassle with trying to commute home (because you get off in AT...L) and your fellow commuter not only doesn’t have to worry about how they are getting to work, but they get paid to get there! How cool is that!
That was just one of the many feature we learned about today. If your last turn is through your base, you can “SIP” it. I don’t know what that stands for, but I know it means I can give that turn away! You can bid for recurrent, SWAP recurrent, have buddies who can access your screen, send and receive messages and pull up a myriad of reports. It’s hard to believe that there will be a time when it will all be so familiar that I won’t give it a thought.
The most exciting moment of the day was when they gave us our bright, shiny, new Southwest badges. Woo-Hoo! No, Bonnie, nobody is gonna pinch you – this is real!
And although that was the most exciting moment of the day, it was not the most amazing. In our presentation on scheduling they walked us through the Commuter Policy. The policy here is that you must allow two flights if you are traveling on an offline carrier. When someone asked what documentation was required that we had actually listed on and attempted to utilize a carrier other than Southwest, we were told that, although they could easily check on us if need be (and would do so if the situation warranted), basically they trusted that we had done as we were telling them. Mouths were gaping in the room – TRUSTED us! Now that’s what family is all about!
We ended the day with a class dinner celebrating the end of our journey after which we joined our Southwest family out in the Texas sun for the Burger and Beer Birthday Bash! We proved we could party with the best of them when we not only took over the dance floor, but shared our class cheer!
So now most of us have retired to our rooms. We have uniforms to iron for our graduation tomorrow. It’ll be a wonderful, historic day. And they better have lots of tissues!
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