Tell me about it. I missed a line by 1 this month, so I was fired up about getting any kind of line for December. Not Happening this month. I went from RSV line 1 to RSV line 9. What the heck is up with that? I heard there are a bunch of DTY's from MSP this month.

Your version of PBS sounds overly complex. Do you guys have multiple layers/choices of stuff or do you just assign points to each request?

anyone with questions about PBS, how to TRY to get what you want, and how "good" it works with little in the contract should get in touch with ANY Continental Pilot.....

They say it goes like this:
Fly a bad month :mad:
Wait in anticipation for next bid
Gain hope for good next month when bidding :D
Wait for results
Get mad at PBS:mad:
Fly a bad month

Rinse, repeat....
It is now a term over there "I got PBS'ed"

I am back on reserve for December, Me and close to 35 other people for DTW

PBS did an awesome job with my December schedule....but I'm not at 9E ;)

Thats great. I'm just thrilled to hear that.;)

Seriously, I'm glad to hear it worked out for you unlike us at 9E. Do you use the manual bidding (points) or automatic? I've tried both and it seems manual bidding is better although not by much.

Do you have Flika (spelling?) for automated drop/swaps? 9E didn't get that option, go figure... It's cheaper for scheduling to keep hitting the "denied due to staffing" button.

I have no idea what you're talking about with manual or automatic. We have no points system so I'm gonna go with no. You just input whatever you want for your schedule next month and roll with it. My comment about PBS was supposed to be sarcastic as the majority of people over at RAH can't stand it either.

As far as dropping/trading trips here....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Yeah I've never seen points or such on PBS...interested in how that works??

With our PBS you have two ways of bidding, manual or automatic. With automatic you assign a low, medium or high preference to your requests. Sounds simple but doesn't work very well. With manual bidding you have to assign a point value ranging from 1 to 1000 to each preference. Again, sounds simple but not so. Each preference scores in different ways. Some preferences score negative points others score positive points. Some preferences score by hour and others score by day or occurrence. What may seem like a logical choice of preferences and points assigned to each can turn out to be a total disaster once the PBS system and the gang in MEM have their way with your bid. You have to be really careful about how you score each preference and a small error in assigning too few or too many points will screw the entire thing up.

There was never any training on how to use this system and the user manual on-line is a joke unless you are a computer programer. You practically have to be Stephen Hawking just to figure out how many points to assign to each preference and what options to choose. Furthermore, everybody has a different take on how to bid. Some tell you to keep it simple, others make it extremely complicated by bidding an avoid (negative points) preference to balance out their desire (positive points) preferences.

In other words, it's a cluster. To make matters worse, it seems that the company changes the parameters and does other behind the scenes work every month so there is no consistency. There is no datum to gauge your strategy against from month to month. For example, one month I made almost no changes to my PBS parameters. However my days off mysteriously changed by 7 days and my credit changed by over 20 hours...

I'd expect that a lot of people will be getting sick much more often despite the draconian 9E sick policy. With this system a lot of us have no control over our lives. We might as well allow the company to assign us whatever they please. PBS at 9E does have it's proponents but I'll be interested to see how long that will last when they get screwed by the system eventually.

Confused yet???

we had this floating around at CAL after our "P"BS was inflicted
 

FWIW it is still wrong because you need to limit each component so you don't get a three item meal of all cheese.