They weren’t close friends. Back when they still had jobs with United Airlines, Joanne Sperekas and Deb Lang worked on the same floor of United’s headquarters in Elk Grove Village, but Joanne was a crew scheduler, Deb an aircraft router. They both lived in Des Plaines, though, so on nights when they were stuck with the 3-to-11 shift, Joanne often gave Deb a lift home. Deb tried to give Joanne gas money, but she never took it. So sometimes Deb would leave a candy bar in Joanne’s mailbox.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Joanne’s job with United had outlasted her marriage; she’d expected to retire with the company. After they cut her loose she sat in her apartment, her nine-year-old daughter, Kristen, keeping her company. Wondering what she’d done to lose her job, she descended into “a black place.” She didn’t watch TV, or read the papers, or pick up the telephone. She submitted some resumes over the Internet, but the aviation industry was flooded with applications and she never heard a thing, which made her even more discouraged. Over the winter her company health benefits expired. Then her savings dwindled to zero. In April she applied for unemployment. She’d never wanted to take a handout, but her rent was $800 a month.
Joanne called. You sound like you’d be qualified to become a dispatcher, Novak told her. Joanne had always wanted to be a dispatcher–it can pay up to $90,000 a year–but as a single mother with a full-time job, she’d never had the time or the money for classes. We can send you to dispatch school, Novak told her. We have a woman named Deb Lang who just finished the classes.
“I’m a former United employee,” Joanne told the recruiter. “I worked as a pilot crew scheduler.”
“Thank you. We will be in touch.”
“I was working on the New York 767 pilot crew desk at United World Headquarters in Elk Grove Village,” she began. “The two United crews were both New York-based crews, and they were my crews. I knew the pilot of the second plane that hit the World Trade Center.”
“I couldn’t do that,” Deb said. “I couldn’t do something where I was looking at a screen all day.”
