even more things!!!

Last Friday it was getting near the end of my shift.  I'd wandered up to the tower cause I was bored and I wanted to check if anyone wanted a break before I went home.  No one did, but I continued to sit up in the tower and shoot the shit with my coworkers.  A few minutes later, an aural alert went off, accompanied by a red EM on the radar scope. We were all like WTF?  so my coworker zoomed out on his scope and we saw a target way out of our airspace up near FWA at FL390 squawking 7700 (emergency!).  I wasn't working so I went to another scope and watched it (in horror).  With each scan, it dropped 4000' to 5000'.  In under 3 minutes it had dropped from FL390 to 10,000'.  I thought for sure it was going to KEEP descending, and I was feeling a little nauseous at the prospect. When it leveled off at 10,000 I breathed a sigh of relief and guessed there was some sort of pressurization problem.  I recalled something from the academy about unpressurized flight only occurring at or below 10,000'.  I'm so smart!!

Anyway, a few minutes later the phone rang, the plane was coming here to land (it was a pressurization problem after all).  So they made me work ground.  It'd been a hot minute since I'd worked an emergency on ground control, probably as far back as when I was still training (October-ish!).  So I muddled my way through that, and the plane landed without incident.  and I breathed several more sighs of relief.

Almost a week later and I'm still vomiting in my mouth a little thinking about that ridiculous descent rate.  Had I been on that plane I'd probably have been barfing everywhere.  Guess that's why I'm a controller, not a pilot!

(side note: squawking is a dumb word.  it requires way too much concentration to type/spell right.)

hmmm... what else?  Nothing, really.  Still keeping on keeping on in training.  the end may be in sight, but I don't want to jinx myself and end up with 8 MORE months of training :/  my new favorite thing to tell people is that I could've had a baby in the time it's taken me and my 2 RDO-mates to certify.

Also I had a man show up at my door today with a can full of ant-killer.  very exciting!  no more ants!  I even left some food crumbs out while I was at work and NO! NOT ONE ANT!  Hooray! :)