Leaving Emirates the airline.

Two years ago last week I left Dubai and Emirates (the airline) after 12 years, to come home and help with the launch of V Australia. This series of posts documents the leaving process - partly as my first attempt at a blog (which hopefully someone will find worth reading), partly as an assistance to others in my position. While this blog should provide some amusement, it should also be of assistance if you are leaving soon as well. There will be differences however - a lot of this depends on your years of service, and I'm sure some things have changed - hopefully for the better!

06.Mar.2008 : Farewell Email

For the past few years, I’ve run a roster process that converts the company roster into a variety of electronic formats through my web site Infinidim. This service provides rosters to about 1000 pilots (about 400 on a paid subscription basis), for which I’ve been charging 100 dhs ($35 AUD) per year.

Today I’m sending out a message to all Infinidim Subscribers informing them that I’m leaving and that the service will continue under Jerry Milek at CrewRosters. The roster service have been a big part of my life in Dubai over the past 4 years. It was a lot of work but brought in some money, which was handy, given the financial cost of commuting and the hit of the Australian dollar’s meteoric rise.

In fact, secretly I’m retiring to go into the used envelope business …

Jerry has had a competing product for a while now that he hasn’t developed, partly because he’s been doing other things, partly because once we encountered each other, we agreed to work together. Jerry’s product is very basic – Outlook Calendar only – but he’s worked out how to suck data straight down from the Ek website to your computer. This means his product is updateable. Once I learned what he was doing, I realised what a great concept he had. He and I agreed not to compete, and to work together. Despite some bumps in the road, I’m pleased to say we’ve managed to stick to that. Jerry has some awesome skills in web site data work which I hope learn from. Between the two of us, we will to great things, I believe.

Not developing a portal download product has meant Infinidim Rosters has suffered, but I figured we’d work together fairly quickly. As it’s turned out, Jerry and I lost almost a year trying to get proper Data Access from Emirates/Mercator. While we could have moved ahead with an updateable version of Infinidim Rosters (or a richer version of his product, more accurately) based on his “back door” technique, we hoped legitimate access would be made available by the company, given the market penetration I had achieved with Infinidim Rosters, and the long standing contacts I have in Ek and Mercator. Several meetings with Flight Ops Managers and a particularly memorable one with some IT Support Techs went absolutely nowhere. A lot of wasted time and effort.

Jerry will now develop a web site to manage the subscription collection and user settings for Infinidim Rosters. That will take quite a load off managing the system, which neither of us will have time for in the near future.

Actually the (mickey mouse) 100 dhs in a named, staff numbered envelope system has worked well, but has provided a few laughs at times. At least every other month I’d get an envelope, marked “Ken Pascoe, FC97, Infinidim Rosters Subscription” in my box with 100 dhs inside and nothing else. Based on that, my personal subscription to the service is paid for the next 20 years! I would pin it to the wall in front of my computer and wait. Eventually I’d get an accusatory call or e-mail asking about why they had been cutoff and we’d go through an envelope identification procedure …

And you just have to love the optimism of the two guys who stuck 100 dhs in my box with nothing else, presuming I would know who it was from. Some of you would use amazingly elaborate envelopes, including one recently that looked like a fortune cookie holder – and some would write their staff number on the edge of the 100m dhs note.

I will continue to work on the Learning Database (I have almost completed the Manual for it!) and the VR to Logbook process. An impending Logbook Database update will allow you to import the data from the PIREP reports into the database yourself, highlighting errors and getting you to provide corrections on the way.

Next Week : While I wrote an e-mail to everyone saying goodbye – it never occurred to me that anyone would write back.