What's It Take?

Love. Joy.   

  Nowadays when inquiring about your vocation people will usually ask, "What kind of work do you do", instead of the question more common from my youth, "What are you?"  But although the question is different now, many times the answer is still couched in the old terms. "I am a doctor." Or in my case, it was "I am an Air Traffic Controller."

Peace. Patience. 


  Air Traffic Controller is one of those jobs that, when people find out what you do, usually leads to several more questions.  The most common one is, "What airport do you work at?" (Given the average person's limited understanding of the profession the question is not unexpected, but it's annoying none the less to the thousands of us that work in, or retired from, an en-route center.)  Other common themes are stress, and particularly recently, sleep.  Something else I've been asked a couple times this week is "What kind of people become controllers?"  I answer that there are many kinds of folks doing the job, but we all share a rare and hard to define aptitude for the work.

Kindness. Generosity.


  The casual conversation usually ends there, but I began to wonder about the details.  What traits are encouraged and rewarded in a controller?  I suppose it seems self-evident, but 'control' is the name of the game. One has to truly command the sector to be successful. Everything is black and white. Mental agility is a must, but decisions are quick and compromise is not tolerated.  We develop a 'my way or the highway' attitude.  So it should come as no shock to learn that a room full of people like this, doing a fairly stressful job, might have disagreements now and again.  Or have trouble dealing with people anywhere that seem to fall short of our standard of 'perfection is normal'.  It was my increasing inability to deal well with these feelings that largely led to my decision to retire early.  I came to realize that I hadn't just developed a short fuse, I had no fuse at all. Just a 'pin' that got pulled all too often.  My year away from the job has helped tremendously, but in many ways I still think and act in the ways I did for 22 years at the radar scope.

Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control.


  This all came to mind again yesterday when I was asked to reflect upon what kind of person I wish to be remembered as, and if I was living that kind of life.  Don't get me wrong. I am proud of the work I did and my service to the country.  But I wonder about what it may have done to me as a human being.  I wonder how much of my success as a controller was due to what I brought to the job, and how much I changed to adapt to it.   I wonder how much of the nine traits listed between the paragraphs above are a normal part of my existence. I do know this: If the job did change me, I can change again.  And if the job only served to let the real me come out, well, I can work on that too.  Just hope I get a ways down that path before it's time to 'remove strips' on my flight plan.