Mark was awesome, it wasn't him.

100% agree, Mark was excellent and pretty much a genius when it comes to system knowledge. The one I am referring to has been around forever and most know him by a three letter abbreviation of his name.

"Let's look it up"

...is he no longer in the emb training department? is he out on another "medical"

good guy - he locked people out of his class when they arrived late!

Lmao. Nailed it.

I agree MS is very knowledgeable. The problem I had with him is his mood swings. The morning session would be pleasant and interactive. After lunch it's like he completely changed. You never knew day to day.

The one thing he did that infuriated me was he picked on this one young naive kid relentlessly. This young man would ask a question and Mark would belittled him. I felt so sorry for him. It was such a problem that I couldn't really concentrate on the subject because I was pi$$ed 90% of the time while in class. This young man would ask questions to me so I could ask because MS would answer it without any rhetoric.

I forgot to add:

The company deducts $1.25 from each pay check to pay for Known Crew-member. I know it's not much but it just goes to show you how cheap they are.
You only get a parking pass in your domicile so if you're a commuter you have to pay for parking at your home airport.
You get paid block or better unless you have a flight cancellation then your overblock disappears and you're back to min guarantee.
ACARS is only used for performance. Even though some aircraft have printers they are decommissioned. No PDC, no ATIS via ACARS.
90 minute call out on reserve.
Mesa manipulates the reserve numbers so that you rarely (I've been here 2 years and I've seen 1 day that was green) have the opportunity to drop or swap during SAP. When we were fat on FOs they would bump the min reserve number way up to keep everything red. Now we're short of FOs so they're red on their own.
No flow or preferential interviews.
Non revs from Mesa get a pretty low priority. Nothing like one of the wholly owned where you get the same non-rev as AA.
Captains on reserve gets 50 seat pay
12 month training contract when you are hired or when you upgrade to captain.
The fast upgrade is gone. It's now around 2 to 2.5 years. Pretty much the same as Envoy.
You are on the bottom of a seniority list when pilots are getting hard to find. In other words stagnant seniority list.
I do not see us getting even close to an industry average contract with decent pay and work rules in the next 3 or 4 years. There a very good chance as Envoy brings on more and more 175s there will be less and less need for Mesa from AAG. Just don't see much of a future at Mesa for a new person.

Go to Envoy. I promise you will be happier. I'd go myself but I don't want to start at the bottom of another seniority list.

How tough would the commute from Houston to Dallas be? Could one commute day of or night before and going home.

It wouldn't be bad. I pulled up the flights for tomorrow to get an idea of what it looked like. Unless I miscounted, it appears there are 7 flights out of HOU and 8 out of IAH to DFW. First flight from both airports gets you to DFW just after 6a so you'd be able to commute in the same day for many schedules. Those flights can tend to be fairly full with lots of business travelers so I'd expect a fair amount of jumpseating. Out of IAH, you could always jump on a United flight. If you had to, you could hop on Southwest out of HOU and take the train from DAL to DFW. If you really found yourself in a bind, you could drive on those rare occasions when things were going wrong with flights, i.e. weather days. Any way you slice it, commuting sucks. But at least with that route the flight is short and you've got a lot of options.

I think it's the best option. IAH has mesa and xjet. those don't sound like very good options at the moment.