30 Years!

30 years!  Not bad going for someone who never wanted to do this job!  

I flew off to Washington DC yesterday and during our briefing our base manager wheeled in the cupcakes and coffee and presented me with a certificate, marking my 30 years with United.  

This special anniversary has made me break my own social media rules!
1. No pictures of me
2. No mention of my real name
3. No mention of the name of the airline I work for.

So please - no paparazzi and no stalkers!

30 years ago I was living in Denver, and had been working as a Travel Agent for a few months.  I applied to work for United, one of Denver's largest employers, as a Reservations agent.  I got the job, but had no desire at all to be a Flight Attendant, but that's another story!  I worked on the ground for almost a year before being talked into applying for a Flight Attendant position.  So I have two anniversary dates - next January I will have my 30 year anniversary as a 'TrollyDolly'.  Maybe I will tell the whole story when I reach that milestone.

I had to move to Washington DC when I started flying, where I lived for 6 months before transferring back to Denver.  I stayed there for about 5 more years and then had a short time being based in San Francisco and then Tokyo.  In 1992 I transferred to London where I had previously spent some of my growing up years.  I thought I would stay a year or so but have never moved back to the US.  Why not?  Well, I could give a whole list of reasons, but one of the main ones is that I love working with all of our extremely professional and hard working London based crews - it has to be the best group of people to work with at United.  I feel very privileged!    


* Forgive me, blipfoto - for the 2nd time this week (see my Mar 17th entry) I have broken a blipfoto rule!  This picture was, of course, taken yesterday the 18th, not today!  But with my entry for the blipfotoforever challenge for yesterday, (see the video!) I had to postpone this til today.  To be fair, the 2nd picture was taken just before landing in DC, which would have been after midnight at home, so maybe I'll get away with it??


*On another note, I finally learned how to create a 'collage' with the free Picasa software.  This is my first attempt.  After struggling to figure it out a couple of weeks ago it came very easily to me this time - a lesson in perseverance!