Patron Hunt

Tschäff Reisberg is Jeff, the creator of the Sequence Decoder. The mission of the Decoder is simple, use software to make our lives easier and schedules more flexible and also to promote kindness and more engagement inside our community. Before becoming an American Airlines flight attendant, Jeff worked on IT projects for United Airlines and as a freelancer. In 2015, Jeff was in a meeting trying to get our company to build us better software. They approved it. Some in our union demanded control of the project and got it. They didn’t solicit input from the flight attendants themselves about what they wanted. Many nights Jeff’d come home and vent to his wife about how badly the meetings went. The designs the programmers were getting from the union were shameful and Jeff was losing the battles. At the end, the union made sure Jeff wasn’t even being invited to meetings anymore. Shortly after, Jeff’s wife and Jeff got married. Instead of having a wedding ceremony, Jeff’s wife urged Jeff to use the funds to build the Sequence Decoder instead. Jeff’s wife knew that Jeff felt like Jeff had let our community down, and she said that if Jeff doesn’t build this, Jeff’ll regret it forever. For years Jeff refused any financial compensation for this app in a nerdy attempt to promote kindness and engagement within our community. If the app is free, Jeff can tell this story and the union can’t lie about Jeff and say Jeff was kicked out because Jeff wanted to be paid too much plus if it’s free than it will increase the number of people who read this message and might take action to get involved in our union. These days in order to keep the servers humming and to pay for the help from other developers, it requires more funds than Jeff’s wife and Jeff can possibly afford. Cruelty is one of the main obstacles to achieving a strong and effective union. Our union’s strength is proportional to how many of us get involved with it. If distrust and cruelty permeate the union it discourages people from getting and staying involved. Software like the Sequence Decoder is difficult to build even under ideal conditions. Features that are easy to explain like “arrival time” are hard to implement. What would be two step task for the company ends up taking twenty steps from the outside. Doing things this way requires multitudes more code, requires more frequent maintenance, bigger servers, but it works, and we are doing it together. It’s not the only thing we got done together. We saved the company from bankruptcy by getting the PSP passed, and renewed twice and kept our coworkers in their jobs connected to their healthcare during a pandemic.

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