Holy guacamole!

It's been kind of a big couple of days in my life. Some of our besties are getting married, one of my longest friends is having a baby and my sometime-employer, United, is merging with Continental Airlines. I won't comment on the friend news, not sure if all the news is out yet but I am SOOOOO happy for everyone involved and I love it when life works in great ways for my nearest and dearest. So I'll tell you more about the big merger.

Nothing really changes for any United employees at first, most especially me. I am still on my 30 month furlough. I'll still send my $10 check every month and keep all my health bennies. The company isn't expected to officially, legally "merge" until the end of 2010 and even that legal merge is only the very first step. After the legal merge, the company will start working on getting a combined certificate of airworthiness and begin the combining of operations. In an email I read today from CO's management to their employees, they think they can have this done by some time in 2012. If you look at new Delta (Delta and former Northwestern), they announced their merge two years ago and nothing major has happened except I think that the old Northwestern planes have been painted and I assume they make announcements as Delta.

As you can only imagine, merging two Fortune 500 companies with tons of employees and different unions on the premises will be mad complicated. I am not even scheduled to return to work until March 2012 so I can just sit at home and wait to see what happens. I have other plans for myself in the meantime that may ultimately affect my situation but we'll have to wait and see (that was kind of cryptic, sorry).

It's going to be a wild ride, that may be the only thing that's certain but I am really looking forward to hopefully having more options within my homestate (Continental's biggest hub is Houston). I'll be sitting here and counting the days until we can pass-ride on Continental!