You know, this business of being a prostitute ....
We had a colleague known as Michael the Jew, and so known only partly because he was of the Hebrew persuasion. Mainly he was one of those annoying types who was always braying in the bar about this or that one of us who had subtracted himself from the population by making such a really, really stoopid mistake, one that he, of course, would never make.
One evening in the bar he was boasting of how he, clever sod that he was, had just paid his own HS-125 type-rating, so that he was now ahead of me on our respective ways up the slippery pole. Yes, he was now bound for glory, soon to be slotted into the right seat of Lima Hopeless, a really ancient Aero Contractors HS-125 Series 3. No more Twottering for him!
I got a bit huffy then, telling him that he was just a prostitute, paying his own type-rating that way.
Then I took another gulp of Star and thought about what I had just said, because there was something in it that did not make sense. When the penny dropped I turned and told him that, no, it was worse than that. "We are all prostitutes here, but you, you bastard, you are giving it away! You are ruining the market, because where would we be if Management expected us all to pay our own type-ratings?"
There's a moral in the story. He did jump the queue, but in the fullness of time those he had jumped over, mostly locals of course, caught up to and passed him, finally dropping him back into the left seat of the Twin Otter, about where he had started.
The last time I met him he was not so full of himself as he had been that night, and soon afterwards he got it wrong going into Abuja and dinged in, when that was the end of Michael the Jew, along with a few of his pax.
It was one of those modern, GPS-driven accidents, seemingly; he was right on centerline but probably working off the wrong waypoint. It seems as if he was using the VOR, 1.8 miles off the threshold, by mistake for the threshold itself, since he stepped down about 1.8 miles too far out and collided, only just, with one of those "Inselbergen" that dot the central Nigerian landscape. Just past that last big hill it was flat terrain all the way to the threshold.
I was back in Germany by then, doing my own conversion ... onto a kitchen stove, and I must confess that being told about him getting his final come-uppance in that way, making a similar sort of stupid mistake to ones that I, like many of us, sometimes had made (except that I had got away with doing that), did put a smile on my prostitutey face.