I. Move. Jets.

Gustav, Hannah and now Ike...
With all the hurricanes battering the East and Central coasts, we've once again been mobilized. Most squadrons on our base are on an accelerated 24-hour schedule, supporting aid and evacuation efforts across the nation. What this means personally is that I'm now working 10 hours a day controlling non-stop jets into and out of the base. 10 hours may not seem like a lot, but the mental toll is incredibly fatiguing.
For those of you who know little or none about air traffic control, imagine a game of 3D chess, board 50 miles in diameter with 9 levels stretching up almost 10k feet. Now place the pieces on the board: an intermingling of 9 to 25 steel pieces, ranging between 5.5 and almost 300 tons each, each constantly moving, each capable of speeds ranging from 115 to 460 miles per hour, and each carrying up to 10 souls on board. Add in rules governing the minimum distance between each piece, pieces that won't obey commands promptly or at all, other players playing other games adjacent to you on all sides, and the fact that sometimes all the games trade pieces with each other. Finally, you're not allowed to look at the game board. Instead, you're shown a representation of the game board, and the location of the pieces is displayed once every 3 seconds for 3/4 of a second. If you're really lucky, the display breaks and you don't get any representation, and have to use your memory and notes scribbled on a 1"x6" piece of paper to remember where everyone is. It can get quite complex quite easily.
But back to the issue at hand. Not only is our daily shift increased, but instead of two crews alternating day and night shifts weekly, we've been shifted to 3 crews on 3 overlapping shifts, shifts that rotate every two days. So my week goes like this: Mon-Tue, 0700-1700; Wed-Thu, 1500-0100; Fri-Sat, 2300-0900; Sun-Mon, On Call. That's right kids, my week is 8 days long, and on the two days I have off, I'm not actually off, I have to stay awake, sober, and able to get to work in 30 minutes or less.
"What's the payoff?" You ask. "Couldn't you keep yourself financially secure in a less demanding job civilian side?" Yes. Yes I could. But the added bonus, better than some extra cash or more time to drink or sleep is this: I'm saving America. Sure I'm not deployed overseas, fighting a controversial war on Terror. I'm not pulling the trigger of an M16 out the window of a Humvee speeding though RPG-infested streets. I'm not calling in an airstrike or flying air cover over a combat zone. But what's less publicized is the daily missions both within and without the states, C17's laden to bursting with medical supplies and non-perishable food and clean, bottled water flying to African famine zones, C17's and C130's and their crews flying 24, 36, 48-hour missions shuttling the residents of Galveston, Houston, Baton Rouge and New Orleans to safe havens away from the fury of Mother Earth. How do you think those pilots get to where they're going safely with their precious cargoes? I move them. Daily, I keep up to 20 planes at a time, their pilots, crew and passengers safe as they journey to their destinations.