A comedy of errors

October 26th, 2005

I made up my mind last night that I would get work done today and I did. I did not get as much as I would have wanted done because I was having problems with something that was peripheral to the problem I was trying to fix. After spending too much time trying to fix something that may only be broken on my box, I gave up on it. I am satisfied that the data I want to send is getting sent as desired, so that is good enough for me.

I took my pants to Moscow to a seamstress to fix the hole in the pants professionally. I said I did not need them until Friday, but she said she could have them done by this evening. Good thing I took her up on that because as it turned out that I was put on Rescue tonight. I was supposed to be on Engine, however, with some changes to the manning levels, I was moved to Rescue. I like being on Rescue because you get more calls. Without my pants I would have had to wear coveralls and I don’t like to wear them.

So before I was to be on call I went to Moscow and picked up my pants. They were nicely done and it only cost ten-fifty. I got into my uniform and went to the station to do rig checks. My shift has to go above and beyond for rig checks. Rather than just the things outlined in the SOP’s, we take all power tools out and run them. We hook up all the tools to the portable power-units for the Lucas tools and run them. The nice thing is that I am getting good at setting them up and running them. The only thing that sucks is that it takes about an hour for us to do the vehicle checks, where other shifts do it in about twenty minutes.

Today was bad. I was cruising along and thought I would be done quickly. I was working on my second tool on the primary portable power-unit. I just finished opening and closing the spreaders. But instead of putting the unit in to “neutral” I left it engaged with the hydraulics still pushing fluid to my tool. Unhooking the tool cause the oil to shoot out of the end of the hose like a spray gun. It got a little bit on me, but covers a fifteen square-foot section of the floor. I turned the unit to neutral to stop the flow, but the lines were both covered in fluid as well as the floor and the spreaders. So I pulled everything out of the fluid and put down some kitty-litter to clean it up. Then I got some help from Shane who was doing the rig check on the Engine.

We cleaned up the mess I made, but we had to put more fluid in the power-unit now. So we had to try to locate the fill on it, and unlike the backup unit which has an easy one to find, we could not find it for sure. We found two places that were possible places. One looked like it had been used often and had tool marks. The other one was still sort of unused looking. So we chose the one with the tool marks after consulting three other people.

But to use it, the tool had to be turned on its back. This was a worry because gas could leak. Once we got it open I poured in a couple ounces of fluid. We set it back on its feet and gas was leaking out of the carburetor. It would appear that we flooded the heck out of it and caused a gas spill right were the earlier hydraulic fluid was spilled. So I got out some more kitty litter and covered that spill. Shane opened the area where the air filter is stored and let it air out and used the air compressor to blow air in there.

We let it sit for a few minutes and tried to start it. It actually started after a few pulls. We let it run for a little bit and then put a tool on it to fill the line that got bled out and made sure the system had enough hydraulic fluid in it. Thankfully it did. We put it away and called it a night.

I stayed at the station and studied the SOP’s a little bit and watched some TV including the new SouthPark.


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