I love learning. I really do. The problem is, I often feel like my hard drive (brain), doesn’t seem to have the capacity to store all of the things that I am interested in knowing about. It might have happened when I hit 40, but I started noticing for each new piece of information stored, some other information drops out the back end of memory; usually a celebrity name or a movie I watched. No biggie. Who needs that crap anyway? Although sometimes I notice it is something more important like the name of a coworker or distant relative or former girlfriend. Not detrimental, but still troubling. The point is: I might be at capacity. Who knows what things I am going to forget with each bit of new information now? A close friend? A sibling? My anniversary? What year Gremlins came out in theaters? (just kidding, that’s in there for good).
Because of the past year and the craziness of the world, the company I work for has had to get rid of some of its routes and change things around. One of the things they did was stop flying the plane that I fly, out of the airport I fly it out of. Which gave me a choice: learn a new airplane or find a new way to feed myself and my wife and our two cats. Actually, the cats are quite wily. I think they would find a way to feed themselves.
Of course it’s a no-brainer: Go through the pain of training and keep the awesome job. Except it’s not a no-brainer. It’s a brainer! It’s a-lot-of-brainer! (I’m making up terms). It’s a whole month of information getting force-fed into my brain. Which, as I have stated above, is already at capacity with things like the names of dinosaurs, baseball player’s stats from the late 80’s, random German words, and the names of mushrooms growing in the Pacific Northwest. Not that I am complaining. I am happy to have the opportunity and thankful that I still have a job in this uncertain time. I am totally willing to give up Ken Griffey Jr.’s batting average in his rookie year to have a roof over my head.
My point is, at this point in my life, training is starting to feel more like a trade-off. As much as it might go against modern neuroscience, I am convinced everything I learn replaces something else in my brain. I just went through systems training for my new airplane and I think I burned up half of my childhood memories. The sad thing is, systems training, for many pilots, myself included, is the worst part of learning a new airplane and the part that is most forgettable. Actually, learning how to FLY a new airplane is kind of fun and worth the brain-space trade-off. But systems training is not learning to fly the airplane, it is learning how the airplane works: it’s the engineer’s revenge on the pilot.
You see, engineers have to stay on the ground and look up at the pilots flying around the toys they built. As much as I respect what they have done, they still got the short end of the flying stick. So they take their revenge by forcing pilots to learn their creation from the inside out. If you were to compare it to a new car, learning to fly is, “Here is the gas pedal, here is the steering wheel, let’s see what this baby can do.” Where systems knowledge is, “Here is the air-conditioner, let’s dig into it and figure out how the energy created by a combustion engine is used to create cold air.” In other words, I want my childhood memories back.
What’s done is done though. The trade has been made. I passed my systems’ exam and forgot most of the people I went to middle school with. I now move on to the next phase of flight training, which I am actually looking forward to. It’s the phase when I get to see the plane in action: put the pedal to the metal, kick the tires, do some donuts. Of course, it’s a simulated plane, but still, it’s way better than learning about which hydraulic system powers the… Oh crap, what do hydraulic systems power anyway? My brain is now dumping stuff from the front and back ends. I apologize in advance if I see you in a month and I forget your first name and that you prefer to be called, “Mom.”
