I remember sitting in the waiting room during airline interviews with the other newbie - hopefuls. I just sat there with my mouth shut because I had no "gouge." I showed up cold. Having just come off a tour flying with a foreign military, and never planning to have been an airline pilot in the first place, I didn't know there was such a thing as gouge.

The other interviewees were going over their canned answers to questions they knew they would be asked. Most were relating some particularly hairy ILS or talking about how they handled a person that didn't flip the checklist back the right way or some ugly landing at some podunk field.

They were tools.