Not arrogant; just frustrated.
While I was furloughed I watched as the company struggled to staff the flights after having put too many pilots on the street. Most of the pilots were flying maximum time. JR Man events were at an all time high month after month. A lot of the JR man assignments would result in the company dropping a trip from that pilot's line later on in the month. They were robbing Peter to pay Paul. Reserves were flying almost every day. Add to that, our reserve language was changed to allow the company to move a reserve pilot's days off to accomodate an assignment. This made it so a reserve pilot couldn't plan anything on a day off. Everybody was miserable, including the furloughees, and it was because we didn't have enough pilots on the property. The company was happy, however. They were finding enough pilots to meet the completion requirements.
It made sense that if pilots only picked up JR man trips during irreg ops, and if pilots stopped making deals with the crewdesks while picking up open time, the company would have to re-evaluate the staffing. The union tried to tell the pilots that their actions were keeping the company from recalling some furloughees and staffing the company correctly. Unfortunately, this was one of the things that was used against us in the lawsuit. Most of the pilots understood the situation. There were still too many that chose to either ignore the message, or were disengaged from what was going on. I'm sure there were a few that needed to take advantage of the deals to take care of their own personal emergencies, and more power to them. I did have to sit through a couple of cockpit confessions where the pilots were convinced that if they hadn't taken the JR man assignments, they thought the company would go out of business.
They would point to the contract and say that since it was in the contract it must be alright. I would tell them that the contract was written pre-BK and that the company had perverted the interpretation to use the clause for normal staffing. That was not the original intent. They would say that the union has put out a message saying that JR man was OK to accept. I would tell them that that is the message that the union was required to put out per the lawsuit. It was not what the union was saying during that period before the recalls.
This thread was asking whether or not a person should pick up open time while there are pilots on furlough. I'm a little bit passionate about the subject, because I've seen some of the worst come out of our pilot group. I responded to one post where someone said that their union was telling them that it was alright. I chose to highlite my experience to show that the message may need some context. Sometimes a person has to take a look at everything that is going on around them in order to understand the message correctly.

I just reread my original post, and I see where I screwed up. In my post I said "everybody needs a picture drawn". That is what I wrote, but not what I meant. It was an unfortunate slip, and I can see where you would call me out as arrogant. What I meant to say is that there are some pilots that you just can't get through to. There will always be those pilots in every group who choose to act only for their own personal gain, or are too apathetic or too disengaged to truly understand how their actions may be affecting everybody else.

Hog