Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

When a Stranger Calls

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Another episode from my Truth is Stranger than Fiction files.

Yesterday, I picked up a charter flight from Scottsdale to Grand Canyon and back. The client’s agent booked the flight at 11 AM and I was supposed to pick up the client in Scottsdale at 12:30 PM. This is far less advance notice than I want, but pre-Christmas business is always slow — other than gift certificates, of course — and I wasn’t about to turn it down. Instead, I hustled my butt off and, at 12:30 PM, was walking into Scottsdale Airport terminal while a Landmark Aviation fueler topped off my helicopter’s tanks.

My passengers were not around. I had a voicemail and it was from them. They were at the FBO at the other side of the airport. Scottsdale has a terminal building and two FBOs. For some reason, no matter how much I stress that I meet passengers at the terminal, they always wind up at one of the two FBOs. In the background of their second voicemail, I heard the FBO staff member explain how to get to the terminal.

I figured I had about 3 minutes to hit the ladies room. I was just finishing my business there when my phone rang. Expecting my passengers, I answered it.

“Flying M, Maria speaking.”

“Is this Maria?”

I don’t understand this. I answer the phone the same way all the time and 50% of the calls start out with “Is this Maria?” Does anyone listen when they make a phone call?

I replied (as I always do), “Yes, this is Maria.”

“My name is Jean. Steve Smith told me to call you.”

So far, this meant nothing to me. I didn’t know a Steve Smith. I didn’t reply, as I let my brain work on this information.

My caller hurried on. “Steve Smith worked with your husband Mike about two years ago.”

At first, nothing. Then a glimmer. “Steve? The guy who makes the ribs? From Texas or someplace?”

“Oklahoma,” she replied, sounding relieved.

Steve deserves his own entry in my Stranger than Fiction files. The poor guy moved from Oklahoma to Phoenix to take a job with my husband Mike’s company. The first night he’s in town, staying at a hotel, thieves steal his truck with all of his belongings in it. Mike, who didn’t know him before that, is one of a few people to help him out as he recovers from that and settles into his new apartment. He came to our house one weekend and made us the best smoked ribs I’ve ever had from our smoker. But he’d left his wife (and kids?) back in Oklahoma and he missed them. One Monday morning, he simply didn’t show up for work. When they checked where he had been living, it had been cleaned out. He basically disappeared and we never heard from him again.

Until yesterday.

Jean was talking again. “I just moved into the Phoenix area. Steve said I should give you a call. I’m looking for a job and I was wondering if you knew of anything.”

WTF?

At this point, I was washing my hands, speaking to her from the inside of the ladies room at Scottsdale Airport’s main terminal through my Bluetooth earpiece. I was expecting my passengers to appear any minute. I had to brief them and hustle them out to the helicopter so they could catch a tour at the Grand Canyon in less than 90 minutes.

And this stranger, referred by a missing-in-action friend, was asking me if I could help her find a job?

“I don’t know of any jobs,” I said. “And I think it’s pretty strange that Steve gave you my number, considering he disappeared off the face of the earth two years ago and we never heard from him again.”

This seemed to surprise her. “Oh, well he always said such nice things about you.”

Like that mattered to me?

She was talking again, but I cut her off. “Listen, I’m waiting for some clients and I really can’t talk now. I can’t help you. Good luck with your job search. Goodbye.”

I heard her say goodbye as I pressed the disconnect button.

Thinking back on this, I’m amazed that it happened at all. This woman relocates into the 5th or 6th largest city in the country. A city with newspapers and Craig’s list and employment companies. But rather than tap into the wealth of all the job listings available to her, she cold calls a “friend” of a friend looking for help finding a job? Even if I was hiring, I wouldn’t hire her (unless I was hiring someone to make cold calls; she seems to have some skill at that). She’s obviously not interested in finding her own job and would prefer to have someone else find a job for her.

A stranger.

Maybe she thought I had a job to offer. Maybe that’s why she didn’t offer any details on the kind of job she was looking for. Hell, she didn’t even say what kind of work she did! Was she a secretary? A lawyer? A hair stylist? Who the hell knows? Maybe Steve told her I had a successful helicopter charter business and needed help. By being vague about the kind of job she was looking for, she thought she could wrangle an offer or interview out of me.

Not likely, for so many reasons.

I’m also left wondering if this was some kind of scam. (New Yorkers really can’t help wondering this when something strange happens. It’s in our blood.) Maybe she didn’t even know Steve. Maybe she found (or stole) his address book. Maybe she thought she would wriggle into some kind of friendly relationship with me. Maybe she thought I could help her find a place to live — or that she could move in with me. Or that she could get financial support from me with some kind of sob story.

If any of that is true, she really called the wrong person.

Vaccine Insanity

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When doctors join in on the fear mongering.

FluViewI’ve been wanting to get an H1N1 Flu Vaccine for a while now. I believe that by getting the vaccine, I’ll not only protect myself from getting the Swine Flu, but I’ll prevent myself from becoming a carrier that can infect other people. In other words: I’ll do my part to help protect my fellow citizens and possibly prevent deaths.

When I heard the vaccine was available in town, I started making calls to see where I could get a shot. The Safeway Supermarket pharmacy ran out of doses yesterday. They suggested that I call my doctor. I did. And that’s when I got a shock.

A receptionist answered the phone. When I asked about the H1N1 Vaccine, she told me the doctor wasn’t giving shots. When I asked why, she replied:

The doctor heard that there were serious neurological side effects to the vaccine. She doesn’t think it’s safe.

What?

I asked the girl for details and she had none. I asked her to have the doctor call me. I hung up and went to Twitter. My query there brought links to two reliable sources of information about the vaccine:

I read the information on both pages. Neither discussed any likely serious side effects. The CDC piece did mention the usual flu vaccine side effects but said the H1N1 vaccine was no more likely than any other flu vaccine to result in those side effects. It also mentioned Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), which was apparently an issue back in 1976. The article said that studies had been done and that the risk of GBS was 1 additional person out of 1 million.

Let me repeat that: 1 person in 1 million.

Is this the kind of risk that worried my doctor?

The phone rang. It was the receptionist at the doctor’s office. She told me that the doctor had read about the risks online, but she couldn’t remember where. (Fox News? I wondered.) She’d also heard about it from patients. (Now patients are advising doctors?) And she’d also heard it from a few doctors.

In other words, it was hearsay from vague, unidentified, and mostly unqualified sources.

Stay home if possible when you are sick. Visit www.cdc.gov/h1n1 for more information.

I told her what I’d learned from the CDC. She wasn’t interested. She wanted to argue with me. Evidently, the doctor’s sources were more valid than the Centers for Disease Control of one of the most advanced nations on the face of the earth. She wouldn’t listen to reason, she wouldn’t give me a chance to speak.

So I hung up on her. Why should I waste my time listening to a raving idiot?

I’ll be looking for a new doctor. Again.

And I’ll keep looking for my vaccination.

You want more information from the CDC? Start here.

You want some satire on the whole vaccine idiocy? Check out this on the Onion.

Marketing Madness

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I design and assemble 24 copies of a 12-page marketing piece for Flying M Air.

Phoenix Tour
River Tours
Moonlight Dinner Tour
Henry Wickenburg's Legacy
Sedona Tour or Day Trip
Grand Canyon Skywalk
Grand Canyon Day Trip
Meteor Crater

The Arizona tourist season is starting and will be in full-swing by mid November. That means it’s time for me to meet with Phoenix and Scottsdale hotel and resort concierges to make sure they’re aware of Flying M Air’s tours and day trips and to make it easy to sell them for me.

With the relocation of my helicopter from Wickenburg to a base much closer to my customers, I was able to cut prices on all of my tours and day trips. That should make them more attractive to customers. They are not, however, cheap. My lowest price tour is a 50-60 minute trip around Phoenix that costs $495 for up to 3 people. My most expensive flight is a day-long trip to Grand Canyon West’s Skywalk that includes at least four hours in the helicopter and all ground fees and costs $2,495 for up to three people. Ouch.

When you’re selling services with big price tags, you can’t expect a flyer printed on your Epson inkjet printer to impress anyone. You need to create marketing materials that will fully explain and illustrate what you’re offering, presented in a professional-looking package.

And that’s what I spent much of the past week doing.

Flying M AirI use plastic portfolio binders with a cover insert to prepare 12-page booklets about my company and its services. The cover has an 8×10 glossy photo of the helicopter with my company marketing design (the blue and red swirls).

Inside, there’s a “Welcome” letter, mostly for the use of hotel/resort guests who might be browsing the book on their own. It provides brief information about the company and urges them to book through a concierge. If a concierge isn’t available, however, they can call us directly for more information and reservations.

Next are full-color information sheets about the tours and day trips we offer. Each tour sheet includes at least two photos of the destination or route, full pricing information, and branding elements such as my logo. You can see thumbnails of these pages here, on the right side of this post. I created each of these sheets in InDesign, using photos from a collection I’ve been building steadily for about six years. When they were finished, I e-mailed them to the local KwikPrint. The folks there printed them out on their color laser printer. Although I have a color laser printer, their’s does a better job and, given the cost of consumables on mine, is actually cheaper. As you might imagine, all of these documents are available as downloadable PDFs from the Flying M Air Web site. I figure I spent about $200 on printing.

August 2009 AZ HighwaysI also included a copy of the front cover of the August 2009 issue of Arizona Highways magazine, which listed my company’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure as “The best way to see Arizona in a week.” I clipped out the paragraph about us and pasted it onto the cover image so both the cover and the text are on the same page. The folks at KwikPrint handled the copies of these sheets,too. They look nice.

Then there’s a full page summary of all tours and day trips and their prices, including optional add-ons like Jeep tours or lunch stops.

Finally, there’s a page that provides information about our helicopter, including the make and model, engine specs, and passenger-friendly features.

Putting the books together was rather time consuming and tedious. We did it after dinner last night. Mike helped me. I spread piles of each page out along the table and we walked around the table, inserting pages into the booklet’s plastic sheets. It took about an hour to do 24 of them. I figure that if I would have paid a marketing firm to do the same job, it would have cost me at least $5K for design and document creation and $20 to $50 per booklet.

The resulting booklets are extremely attractive and professional. They present the image I want people to have of my business. The removable pages make it easy for a concierge to pull out a page and make a copy for a guest or co-worker. Frankly, the only way I could make this any better is to print individual booklets using something like iPhoto. But if you make them too nice, people take them as souvenirs — as I discovered the expensive way with a local guest ranch a few years ago.

But what’s most important about the booklets is that they provide all of the information a concierge needs to help a guest make an informed decision about a tour or day trip with Flying M Air. And that, after all, is the purpose of this exercise.

Later this week, I’ll start making the rounds with my husband, Mike, who has become the company’s Marketing Manager. By that time, we’ll have my new business cards back from the printer.

This season, it’s do or die in the Phoenix area. I’m determined to make it work.

I Love My 1987 Toyota MR-2

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Book value: $250. Reliability: Near 100%.

This morning, I had to drive down to Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT) to pick up my helicopter for a charter out in Aguila, AZ. I have a 1987 Toyota MR-2 that I bought new in October 1986. That’s my airport car. It basically lives down in Deer Valley when I’ve got the helicopter out. The idea was to drive it down to Deer Valley, park it, do my flight, and then bring the helicopter back to its Wickenburg hangar so I could wash it before returning it to Deer Valley.

That was the idea, anyway.

This morning, the MR-2 roared to life, just like it aways does. But I had some trouble getting it out of first gear — I leave all my cars in gear when I park on our hilly driveway. I rolled back and got it half turned around. Then I attempted to shift into first or second to depart. The gearshift wouldn’t budge.

Understand this: the car is standard transmission. It was my first standard transmission car. I learned to drive stick on that car. A week after taking it home, I was driving back and forth to my job in downtown Manhattan from New Jersey, battling bridge and highway traffic. I got really good with a stick shift really fast.

And the car still has its original clutch.

It only has 133,000 miles on it. When I bought my Jeep in 1999, it became my secondary car. When I bought my Honda S2000 in 2003, it became my third car. I didn’t even need it for sporty drives anymore. That’s when it became my airport car.

R22 and Toyota at Howard Mesa

Here’s my old helicopter and Toyota MR-2 parked at Howard Mesa during the summer of 2004.

I don’t think I put more than 1,000 miles per year on it after that. It spent the summer of 2004 at Howard Mesa or Grand Canyon Airport when I flew helicopter tours for one of the operators at the Grand Canyon. It spent at least two years in Prescott as an airport car — my mechanic was based there for a while — and then another whole season in Scottsdale — I used to fly there quite often. When the Scottsdale cops called and threatened to tow it away, I drove it home. It spent a year or two in my hangar. Then I brought it down to Deer Valley to be my airport car there.

It didn’t mind neglect. It just about always started up when I turned the key. The only exception was once in Prescott, when the battery had finally died. Fortunately, I’d parked it pointing down a little hill. I released the break, popped the clutch in second gear and got it started. Drove it to Sears, put in a new battery, and went about my business.

Every year or so, I get the oil changed. I bought it new wiper blades and sun screens about a year ago.

Today, when the clutch wouldn’t engage, I wasn’t very surprised. Hell, it was the original clutch! More than 23 years old! What the hell did I expect?

Honda and Toyota

My Honda visits my Toyota at DVT.

I took my Honda down to Deer Valley. I locked it up. I wasn’t happy about leaving my best car overnight at Deer Valley. The Toyota was disposable. The Honda wasn’t.

As I flew west to my gig, I thought about the Toyota. I wondered if this was how it would all end. It didn’t seem right to put hundreds of dollars into a car with a Kelly Blue Book value of under $250.

I did my gig. It involved over 3 hours of flying north of Aguila. It ended with a flight to Wickenburg to photograph some property. I’d drop off my clients at either one of the spec homes they’d built or nearby private helipad that they led me to believe was part of their property. We were doing the photo flight when I heard some chatter on the radio. Wickenburg Airport was closed. Turns out, an F-16 trainer had crash-landed there earlier in the day. So I landed on the helipad. I didn’t have enough fuel to get back to Deer Valley and I couldn’t land at Wickenburg. I wound up leaving it there for the night. As I type this, the airport is still closed.

Back at home, Mike got the idea that maybe the Toyota’s clutch wasn’t broken. Maybe it just needed fluid.

We pulled the owner’s guide out of the glove box and looked it up. We found the reservoir. It was bone dry. (Oops!) We grabbed some of the recommended DOT 3 brake fluid out of the garage and filled the reservoir. I pumped the clutch pedal. A lot. I started the car, pushed down the clutch pedal, and smoothly shifted it into first gear.

It works.

So my Toyota continues to run smoothly with its 23-year-old clutch. Best of all, it seems very forgiving of my neglect.

How can I not love a car like that?

Yes, I’m Still Among the Living

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And do I hate deadlines!

I’m too busy to blog, so don’t expect much here. I finished a book and immediately flew to Ventura, CA to record a video course. I’m in a soundproof booth all day long. Then I go to my hotel and sit at a desk in front of two laptops, preparing for the next day’s recording sessions.

I’m even too busy to tweet!

On Saturday, I fly home. Then, on Sunday, I start another 6-day helicopter excursion.

Since I apparently haven’t posted anything for at least a week, I thought I’d send this just to let everyone know I’m still alive.

Maybe I’ll have time to blog next week.