mmmrrrph.

yesterday at work was pretty retar-culous. I don't think I've ever had my brain reduced to mush as fast as it was yesterday, even after 4 years of calculus, physics, chemistry and meteorology classes.  Within 5 minutes of plugging in, I was wishing I'd called in sick.  ugh.  It is a rare occurrence for me to have my ass kicked on ground control, but it did not take long for me to start swirling down the shitter.

please forgive my atrocious photoshop skills here for a moment:

on this radar image (which remained pretty much the same all afternoon) I have oh-so-kindly drawn the approximate location of our departure gates.  As you can see, pretty much every single one was cut off by death-storms.  The TRACON was not accepting anyone heading east (RID/DAY), south (DAWNN3 departure, OOM, PXV...), nor would they accept people heading north then east, unless they remained below 10,000', which of course no one wanted to do.  So I quickly ran out of places to park planes and pilots were getting snippy with me.  Hellllloooooo, meteorology degree + air traffic control does not equal weather controller, sorry!!!  I was trying my best to work things out to get them outta there, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do.  Also, it was way worse than normal, because this weekend is the INDY 500.  So traffic is way up.

Moving on, I get a mini-break to rest my brain before a skill check on Local control. It was not enough.  I needed like a day to recover from the shit-show on ground control. I was checked, and no skill was found.  What else is new?  I have been training for almost 8 months now.  My "I could've had a baby by now" joke is getting old.  It is torturous.  My supervisor says I am ready, so why not check me out?!  Getting one hour of training a week is not helping me AT ALL.  I cannot get any better at something only being exposed to it an hour a week.  I can handle the traffic (which is so unbelievably, unfunnily SLOW every day I am at work) so why not cut me loose?  Because there are THREE of us in the same position, and they're treating us as ONE person. One of us screws up something, we all get another week/month/year added to our training.  It's stupid.

Here are some more pics from later in the evening when we actually got some t-storm action at the airport. Sorry for the poor quality, blackberry has the worst cameraphone in the history of the world.

Here we had windshear over the whole airport.  My coworker says he has only seen this happen maybe once before. 

here's a black death-cloud over the fedex ramp. 

this looked a lot squirrelier in real life.