Happy Helper

I got to train an assistant today. I don't know if he'll be helping me again, but I hope he will. Marcel is the new guy in blasting and shipping, and since things were slow in his department and I needed someone to put barsets together while I welded, he was given to me for four hours.

Marcel is a sweetheart. He flashes that brilliant smile of his all the time, he has a great personality, and he wants to be as good as he can possibly be at whatever he does. He shows great attention to detail and assimilates new information quickly.

This is going to seem strange, coming from someone who's obsessive-compulsive, but... I wish he were less obsessive-compulsive. I love that he wants to do a good job and get the barsets set up perfectly for me to weld, but he's so intent on making them perfect that it takes him forever to do each one. Fortunately I had a dozen barsets already welded and waiting for some extra tacking and grinding, so I worked on those while he gently tapped each blade and spacer into its proper position.

When I trained him, I was almost finished putting together a set and ready to get back to welding, so I only demonstrated enough that he got the idea and could be unsupervised until I was finished welding the set I was working on. If I get him again tomorrow, I think I'll have him watch me put together an entire set so he'll see how little he really has to do to get the job done.

Try, Try Again

Joe, for all his experience and wisdom, is still only human. Humans make mistakes. Joe made the same mistake twice.

The specifics of it are a bit difficult to explain, but the gist is that when he designed blades for the rotor barsets, he shaped one end incorrectly on four blades. (That's four blades per barset, with 36 barsets on the rotor, plus two extra barsets just in case; 152 incorrect blades.) I showed him the problem, he chuckled at his mistake, and then he went back to the office to re-program the blades that needed to be replaced.

Eric, whom I affectionately call "LaserMan" in my head (because he operates the laser cutter), brought me the new blades. I broke them out, replaced the incorrect blades, and stacked a barset in a fixture. I looked at the set, shook my head, and went to the office to get Joe.

I showed him the barset with the "correct" blades. He looked at it for a moment, leaned over the table, put his head on his arm, and started laughing. "I can't believe I did that," he said, shaking his head and trying to stay lighthearted about the situation. "I'll go fix it, but the new blades might not be ready for a while. Break out the stator blades while you're waiting."

It took two or three hours for the new blades to be cut (five minutes to redesign the blades, ages in the cutting queue, and then just a few minutes under the laser), during which I nearly finished breaking out the stator blades. The new rotor blades fit properly this time, and I had a happy little geek moment with the stator blades.

There are 50 types of blades for this stator, with 38 blades of each type. Because we haven't built anything to use for sorting that many types of blades, I wrapped each type in gaff tape and wrote the blade number on the tape. There ended up being a duplicate set of one of the blade types: #42. I wrapped up both sets, wrote "42" on one, and "DON'T PANIC!" on the other.

Now where did I put my towel?

L'Animosité

On Thursday, Luc spent a few hours at the worktable helping me break out blades and build sets. It's part of the management style of our Japanese super-parent company: managers should understand and know how to do their underlings' jobs. Every time someone walked past the table behind Luc, they glanced at him, looked at me, and rolled their eyes as if to say, "oh god, he's out here again? Good luck." It's starting to annoy me.

Joe has taken to calling the company "the frog pond," and complained yesterday about our Canadian engineer's imperfect command of the English language. Never mind that English is a second or third language for all of our Canucks. They're seen as the enemy because they don't speak the way we do.* Between the accent, the vocabulary, and the conjugation of verbs, they never had a chance.

When I was assembling the rings for the next rotor and stator last week, Joe gave me a page of instructions that Christophe (the engineer) had written. With the exception of a few words, his English is very good... much, much better than my French. I brought in my French-English dictionary yesterday and spent my break writing notes for Christophe, hoping that he'll see them for what they are: an attempt to make life a little easier for everyone. Nobody knows when he'll be back in the shop (he telecommutes from Quebec most of the time), but when he visits again I'll have to remember to give him the notes.

I need to pick up some language tapes next time I'm out shopping. I want to be able to say something more useful than "le singe est sur la branche."


* Let's just ignore the fact that phrases like "he don't know no better" come out of the mouths of the same people who say that the Canadians don't speak English properly.

Repeat Performance

Remember when we had to scrap an entire set because the barset angle was off? Well, this time it wasn't the barset angle, it was the cutting angle.

Heh.

We also have a backlog of orders, but limited equipment, so we keep having to stop a job halfway through and start the next one because we're waiting on parts for the first one. Dan, Chuck, and I broke and built two sets and started breaking a third in about an hour and a half because we had no spacers. The good news for me is that the saw was being used to cut spacers for my conical barsets.

Joe told me that he'd have blades for the conical ready for me tomorrow, so hopefully I'll get to go back to my corner and build those barsets instead of hanging out with Dan and Chuck. Not that I mind them, I'd just rather be off on my own.

Gender Equality

I went home early today. Between being a bit anemic, being exhausted, and being depressed, I felt like I was going to collapse if I didn't go home and sleep, so I found Paul and let him know that I was leaving. I wasn't really doing anything important today, since I'm waiting on blades and spacers for the stator, so it's not a big deal.

Earlier in the morning Paul took me aside and told me about a decision that had been made. There are four restrooms in the building: one ladies', one men's, and two unspecified, one of which is in the office. The office staff uses the one in the office, and everyone else uses the rest of them. Since men outnumber women at least five to one in the company and eight to one in the shop, I don't expect the "Ladies" sign to deter any of the guys.

Paul, though, seems to think that "those slobs" should learn how to read. He told me that he's going to put a lock on the door of the ladies' room and give us four women keys. I think it's a bit much, but I'm not going to object. It'll be nice to have my own restroom... the other three women are either in the office or on second shift, so I'll be the only one actually using it during the day.

I have a feeling the guys are going to be angry. Oh well.

Ring My Bell

When a conical refiner comes out of the furnace and cools down, we perform two simple tests to see if it was made correctly: the eye test and the ear test.

The eye test is just a visual inspection. We make sure none of the barsets have detached from the shell, that none of the blades have popped out, and that none of the welds have cracked.

The ear test is more fun for me because of my musical background. I've always loved tapping metal things to hear the tone and clarity of their resonating frequencies, and that's just what we do with the conical. We take a small hammer or wrench and tap each barset. If every tap results in a bell-like ring, everything is good. If the sound is dull, there's something wrong.

The rotor I made last week sings.

*whew*

Like The Bunny With The Drum

I worked for 13 hours today.

Good night.