For The Birds

Just now, in the Control Room:

Engineer: Remote Location #1 can't do their Transmissions check; their engineer hasn't shown up yet.
Me: How long do we have the bird*?
Engineer: Until the end of the hit, but Remote Location #2 is supposed to do their check at 6 and we can't take them at the same time.
Me: Location #2 is ahead of schedule, call their engineer and see if they can get up on the bird early. If we can check Location #2 while Location #1 is working on their uplink, we won't be too far behind.
Engineer: So you want Location #2 to be the early bird?
Me: *groan* Something like that, yeah.
Engineer: Somedays, this job is for the birds.

I haven't even had my morning coffee yet - because it's freaking 5:15am and I think that still technically qualifies as night.

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*bird = satellite