That's just fear.
Fear of being taken for a lot of precious, whiny little bitches!
When I went on the 328 I had one guy complaining to me that with one of the two packs out the cockpit temperature could get up to 25º C.! Brutal ....
(I remember the first time I leaned in to get a look at the cockpit of the new EC-155, leaning against the seat back cushion as I did so. When I backed out I realized that the arm of my shirt was now soaked in sweat from that cushion like a big, wet sponge. Eeewww!)
Another good one was listening to whining about having to squeeze the 328 into the NAF Base Port Harcourt, a tight fit at 5,300 feet long and 100 feet wide! I finally told this moaning German to get a life, to go take a look at Warri Airstrip some time, 700 x 18 meters or whatever that was.
That guy was ex-Lufthansa ... no idea how his career took the turn it did, to end up in the Center of Excrement with us, but something must have gone badly wrong there. He got kind of bored one day down at our hangar when he was on a day off, dressed in a tee shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Then he went walkabout, wandering into the Police Air Wing hangar for want of anything better to do. The policeman on guard duty watched him wandering around, doing nothing about that until our man touched one of the derelict 222s there. Then the policeman pounced, arressing him!
I guess the CP was not happy, having to buy him back ....
Not long afterwards I came up with a new game, Touch the Helicopter. Points could only be scored by going into the PAW hangar and doing that, but not being arres/sed, of course, with more and more points being awarded for the less and less that you wore. Double points for no tee shirt, triple points for no shorts .... Max points could be scored by doing that naked, but I never found anyone who wanted to play the game with me.
Boredom was a constant threat in Lagos, and it gave rise to all sorts of odd behavior on the part of hot, bored, unhappy people working as subcontractors for Shell. The usual response was alcohol abuse and adultery, but I got bored with the one, and the other was not an option because of a very strict Catholic upbringing, one that taught me how to practice guilt without sex.
When our little friend the Scottish Dwarf was caught up in that sex scandal I used to swap notes with this rather clever young Nigerian woman who was in charge of our Shell terminal in Lagos. She was always good for a laugh that way, wanting to know what was going on "down the line," even when it was some obvious lie about those placed unjustly above us. (Who was below us, the Tea Lady? Well, her and the helicopter pilots, of course!)
One day, returning from a brutal day of four or even five sectors flown, there she was again, asking "What news on the Rialto?"
Something came over me then, so that I baited her with the Dwarf's unfolding drama. (What had started as some sort of semi-consensual sex scandal, bad enough in its way since the other party was his houseboy, not even the Tea Lady, had escalated weekly with the supposed use of bribery; threats of violence; actual violence; and even, last week, the supposed use of a pistol ... all just supposedly but never mind that now, because we were bored, and because we hated the Scottish Dwarf.)
So I said to my little partner in bitchery, "You remember last week, that it was a pistol he was supposed to have been threatening his houseboy with, yes?"
"Oh yes, yes! So, what is it now?"
"It's not bribery, and it's not a pistol. No, it's something else, something even worse than a pistol .... "
"O God, I love it! What is it this time?"
"No, it's not a pistol ... definitely not a pistol, but something else .... "
"Tell me, tell me! I can't stand it!"
"It was a, a ... well, I can not tell a lie. It was a .... samurai sword!"
You know that scene from "When Harry Met Sally," the one where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in a café? it was like that.
It's so nice to have an audience that appreciates good art.
Last edited by chuks; 10th Oct 2016 at 12:39.