Entries this day: cool_day_at_work

cool day at work

Friday 13 August 1999

Today I had a super fun and tiring hot day at work! I've been working for a small company called Cable and Electric, which installs data cables for computers or phone systems and does electrical wiring. I've been simply riding around with a guy who goes by "Duran" (not his real name, but I don't know his real name) doing odd jobs around the city.

Today our goal was to install one (1) cable between two buildings owned by a business I'll call DC. The buildings were on opposite sides of an industrial street thing, with 18 wheelers and big equipment using it often. We therefore had to string the cable way up about 20 feet in the air to make sure that it remained intact.

That meant I got to climb!

First up onto the roof of the first building, where the cable was fed from the inside through a slot in the roof. I pulled enough cable to toss it down to Duran on the ground who pulled it around two telephone poles (on which we would eventually string the cable) and into a big pile on our side of the street.

Then I got to grab the cable and climb the roof of the other building, pulling two roof-lengths worth of cable out across the roof of the second building! I tied the cable to a pipe on the building and Duran tied it way up on the second telephone pole, so we kept it still out of reach of the trucks below.

Then I fed the cable down to Duran into the second building through a little tiny hole in the side of the building up near the roof. I helped feed the cable through as Duran pulled it into a big pile on the floor.

Then inside the building I got to climb more! Using an extension ladder, up to the ceiling of the two story warehouse, I fed the cable through the ceiling support beams using a pushpole to extend my reach by about 16 feet. At two points during this process, I got to climb up huge stacks of plywood in the middle of their warehouse, feeding cable through the ceiling supports, walking on top of the plywood and carefully stepping from stack to stack.

Then we got to send it through what turned out to be the original DC warehouse, now full of old stuff: adding machines, antique chairs, stacks and stacks of business documents, a huge huge polished wooden table, lots of stained glass windows, just all kinds of crazy fun old stuff, plus lots that we could not identify!

We reached the length of our cable before we reached our destination, so we started back at the beginning, pulling about 60 feet of slack and actually fixing the cable to its new permanent path.

That meant I got to drive/ride the 36 foot cherry picker! It has little switches that control the length of its arm, the angle the arm points into the air, and the rotational angle that it leaves its base. Way way fun, and I tied the our cable up to an already-attached cable on the telephone poles. (Please note: the already-attached cable was not a power line. I don't actually know what it was, except that it was well insulated, and was the lowest cable on the poles.)

We had to place the base of the cherry picker about 6 different times so I could eventually reach the entire length of suspended cable. I got pretty proficient at driving the cherry picker as I rode in its bucket. There were a couple of times that I was extended the full distance out and it was super wiggly, but the base stayed put and we had no problems. Another couple of times I got to extend the bucket out over parked cars, and twice I was extended out over the street and 18 wheelers drove under me!! Wow! Scenes from action movies jumped through my head as I wondered what it would be like to jump onto the trailers as they passed under me.

An entirely different cool experience involved one of the 18 wheelers. The guy parked it nearby and attached a hose from his truck to a socket thing in a box near a fence. Four large tubes extended up from the box, over the street and each attached to one of four different silos on the opposite side of the street. Hmmmmm.

After I was done tying up the cable, I talked to the guy driving the mystery hose truck. We had to speak loudly to be heard. "What are you pumping?" I asked.

"Flour."

"Flour? You mean like, flour." I made a gesture expressing flour as best I could.

"Flour."

Whoah, I thought. "Whoah."

I studied the tubes for a moment, and noticed a clear bit of tubing just above where his hose attached inside the box. Zipping straight up like a vertical river, white powder flew through the tube.

"It doesn't look very fast," he offered, "but it's going about 15 miles per hour."

I asked for other interesting numbers. This is what I got:

His truck can carry fifty thousand pounds of flour at a time. It takes two truck loads to fill one silo.
It takes about 1 hour to unload the entire 50,000 pounds of flour from his truck.
He only fills the first two silos; the other two are for wheat.
He unloads his truck into one of these two silos four times per day!!!

Holy cow this bakery uses two hundred thousand pounds of flour in one day. One bakery. Amazing.

"ROB!!" It was Duran.

"I gotta go back to work."

We pulled the extra cable the rest of the way through to the office where it needed to go. I got to climb the ladder again and attach it along the upper inside wall of the warehouse. During this process, I noticed the wall on which I had my ladder was the original exterior wall of the original warehouse. They just added the big new warehouse onto it! The paint was chipped and flaky on the wood slats like shingles designed to block the elements. An old rain gutter was carefully slathered with tar to keep it waterproof, but it hadn't seen rain in many years.

Once we got into the office, we weren't actually able to finish the job; we couldn't pull the cable down the wall as it had multiple blocks within it, effectively blocking the way of our cable. We'll probably go back on Monday and finish up. permalink