Yes Bligh....your incessant divergance to matters irrelevant but non the less associated with me clearly divulges your interest in slandering me as sport. Though you know me you quite obviously don't KNOW me at all and it shows in the depth of the stupidity of your comments. Do you really think I had no balls in turning down the offer to move to ADL? Do you know anything at all? Probably not. Let me ask you this much. Suppose you were offered the opportunity to trek up Mt. Everest or take a rocket ship to Mars, be the first human to go there. If you get there you get all the glory, and who doesn't occasionally want their fifteen minutes of fame? The risk is this, either the trek will take place in the period of maximum avalanche probability or the rocket has enough fuel to get to Mars and back but only if there is not a single error in planning and tracking. The risk in either case is you die and lose everything you currently have which in your case could be a wife and kids and friends. The prize is fifteen minutes of glory. Is it an acceptable risk? The driving force in my life used to be aviation, the career chase so many of us are a slave to. These days aviation is to me a great way to earn a living but it isn't what drives me on from day to day. I get that from the need to do something that scares the living hell out me at least twice a week and I get that through my chosen leisure activity, on a mountain bike. But for there to be any value in that experience I have to be able to survive the event. Thats what I call acceptable risk. If I do my part right I will succeed and be envigorated for another day. I digress however.
Instead imagine this. The CEO of your company invites you down to the office for tea and bikkies. The offer is a management position for which you have no prior experience, no substantial building block of experience or any immediate interest. The terms of the "offer", a term I use loosely because in the corporate world there are very seldom offer's but always expectations, don't contain a job description, don't contain a salary figure or at best one that changed every time the matter was raised on the phone, never contained a contract in writting to examine but which was promised day after day to be formalised and sent in the overnight mail. It never came. The offer involved giving up flying for the most part and I love my flying. The 40 or so hours a month that a management pilot was supposed to get equated to about 40 hours every six months when I did my own asking around. This offer also required my wife to give up her job which she loved and move from a new house we had just started to build to live in a city we didn't have any desire to live in. All this and about three weeks to pack up and make the move. Yeah, right. The "offer" was poorly planned, poorly executed and in the end a terrible waste of goodwill. I could clearly see that the result of the move would have been to make me a highly paid paper pushing office boy. Hey, you gotta start somewhere I know but they weren't being transparent enough in that respect and we all knew that. I took advice from several people in the management circles who all said I would be good in the job but did I really know what I was getting myself into. Well yes I believe I did after a week or so of reflection. Was it an acceptable risk to stop flying, to get myself cornered in a position with no job description or contract in writting. To make the decision for my wife that she WOULD give up her job and she WOULD move to ADL whether she wanted to or not? What would the prize be if it all paid off? A good bloke(?)making inroads into the quagmire of beaurocratic military management? The loss could have been my wife, my happy sanity, and my friends . I didn't see this as an acceptable risk. In hindsight I think it took balls to say no. Certaintly looking at the failures of those that flocked down there afterwards in search of the "title" and the power one can see the need to plan and choose your managers wisely. I never have believed burning a person out or assuming up front that someone will have a "use by" date" after a very short time is good management of your human resourses. I didn't think I would have fit in too well and thus I chose not to go. I made the right decision. We remained good loyal employee's after that as well in spite of the abuse my wife received for not taking the "offer". Thats not the only "golden" opportunity I have passed up in life either Bligh. I put the well being of family and lifestyle ahead of my own aspirations again a few years later. It is really quite an uplifting experience to follow the road less travelled in this business and put others interests ahead of your own. When it got so that I no longer felt happy in the NJS camp Bligh, I voted with my feet. At least I had the choice, perhaps you never will pardna.
[ 19 February 2002: Message edited by: sprucegoose ]</p>