Where has all the paint gone?

After fruitless searching for paint yesterday we spent the morning in a warehouse that reminded me of the last scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The DOS based inventory software was designed before the Berlin Wall fell and was never intended to keep track of a large project with supplies spread through 50 odd shipping containers and 4 storage buildings. After being fed up with the computer's lies and runarounds Matt (the other general assistant) and I decide left the power plant with a pickup truck and some tin snips to start opening boxes.

It took us a surprizingly short amount of time to find the paint. Luckily the Department of Transportation requires boxes filled with paint and paint thinner be labeled as such to warn firefighters if a truck carrying them gets into an accident. We started by opening anything that said "Paint Inside" and after a couple of hours had found everythign we needed.

This of course left us with a small problem. We had been budgeted the entire day to find the paint and we had it found, loaded in the truck and unloaded at the power plant by 10am coffee break. Our new boss is an easy-going guy in his late 20's but he's getting a little sick of us finishing stuff in 1/4 the anticipated time. He was happy to hear we found the phantom paint and told us he didn't have anything other than dusting for us to do for the rest of the morning.

We took a little detour on the way back to dusting. Matt had SKUAed a cable so we can now plug our iPods into the DeWalt jobsite radio and listen to music while we clean. While we are dusting, however, there is no safe surface to put the radio on. Solution: use Unistrut racks for hanging electrical panels to hang the radio on the wall. Which is exactly what we did.

I'm off to do some data processing for the digital controls this afternoon. Lots of moving numbers around on a spreadsheet but the winds are gusting to 30 MPH today so at least I'm inside for the time being.