Moi?
Neo, you know me! I was ready to come back, more for the craic and the Dornier than anything, esp. since the new terms and conditions were USD instead of GBP, as if I wouldn't notice that. But it certainly wasn't a case of "drop everything to jump back into the big red, white and blue meat grinder," no.
If you bother to read between the lines in what I have written here I am not stating that I am any better than the rest of you; I would have still been there if it were not for the strange workings of fate and a certain German !!!!!-head. Well, up to age 60, anyway. The numbers made sense so why jump? Same logic most of you use, I think.
In strict money terms what I did was a disaster, swapping the steady supply of drinking vouchers for 15 months off work, mostly living in London, flying in the U.K., doing a ride with the C.A.A. when just the test fee is 900-odd pounds, doing a self-financed simulator ride... none of that made any numerical sense so that I should have just sat tight working on the garden house and waiting for Captain Scheisskopf to spit the dummy so that I could return. The satisfaction of getting that ATPL was probably worth it, though, even if 18 months of hard work now has only just covered the cost of that.
All I want to say is that there is life outside Nigeria. I had heard rumours of that and yes, it really is so. There's a weird mind-set that most of the old hands get into that just keeps them cemented in place to the puzzlement of outsiders, when I was no different to most.