Chim Chiminey...

Me after I had scrubbed of a layer or two of soot

The Utilities Technician or UT shop needed help cleaning boilers this week so I got volunteered. It was actually a welcome change for me since I have spent all of the last few weeks in the new power plant. I came home covered in soot and looking like a coal miner or chimney sweep but I had fun seeing people's reactions.

The UTs are a fun group who do a good job of keeping the aging equipment on station running. The head of the shop is an amazingly nice guy who speaks with a thick Czech/Russian accent. His kind demeanor is even more impressive in light of his menacing tattoos and all the legends about him like his being drafted into the Soviet army to fight in Afghanistan and his escape to America.

After two days of cleaning boilers I spent a day working for "The Legend" checking furnaces in the huts out at the Ice Runway. (the ones I shoveled the snow out of two months ago) The ice runway can't support the weight of planes landing any more and all the huts are all being moved so I had to work fast.

While I was off cleaning boilers one of the painters got shocked by some half-installed electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. The painter managed to get herself off down from where she was working and is fine but it startled all of us who work down here. I had been painting around them a couple of days before and had been treating them as if they were live -which turned out to be a good thing- The whole project got shut down for a couple of days while there was a safety review going on. I don't know what is going to officially happen. There are a lot of what if's and should haves in everybody's mind. I'm less concerned about the fact that it could have been me and more angry at myself for not asking my boss to have an electrician come down and check the wires.

The painting has been a nightmare of working around all sorts of stuff. The construction schedule didn't allow for painting because "more critical" things needed to be put in to try and get the project done on time. Now that the plant didn't get done on schedule and the project's officially on hold there's time to paint AROUND everything. Half the time there hasn't been a good place to stand and I've had to squeeze myself into all sorts of odd positions.

I'm amazed that with all the safety training I've had to go through, with all the weekly safety meetings, with all the signs around that say "work safe" and even with a boss that is very approachable I got so focused on trying to get the @#%$ing painting done that I didn't think it was worth waiting a while to have a circuit checked. It bothers me that with all this emphasis on safety I didn't push back more and say the painting job was unsafe. I'm surprised by how much pressure I felt to get the job done when nobody was really putting any pressure on me. I guess I was just trying to be a good first-year GA.

Enough of that for now. It's a nice day out, the temperature's getting up toward freezing and the sun's really warm without that Ozone layer getting in the way. It's Sunday so I think I'm going to go enjoy my time off and play outside.