Original Message

Say you're at a busy as a beaver EMS base with added tacit pressure to fly. The mechanics are lazy and don't want to maintain the aircraft. They will only fix something if you write it up. The company whole-heartedly agrees that there will be no text message or post-it note mantenance. If it's broke: write it up. End of story. Only problem is that if you write up everything little thing breaks since they WILL NOT FIX IT otherwise, it puts the  aircraft  OOS for a minimum of 1-2 hours. It really doesn't matter what it is, it's 1-2 hours OOS time. The customer starts noticing the new pilot is writing up everything and is costing a lot of OOS time and missed flights. Starting to see how this works?

Now say you bought a house and moved the family to this base. You eventually realize the customer will run you off because YOU OBVIOUSLY ARE THE PROBLEM. The mechanics know this. They now pretty much have complete control over you, so you must play their game or you will soon be uprooting the fam when the customer eventually tells you to hit the trail.

I have seen this happen a few times in my career. It is an absolute no win situation. My advice is DO NOT move to a base for probably 6 months until you find out what the maintenance situation is first!