Monthly Archives: June 2011

June 9, 2011 · 7:44 pm

How much longer…


In one of my first posts I mentioned that I have a seriously love/hate relationship with this job.  I then proceeded to talk about how much I loved what I do, but I promised I’d spew some hate before it was all said and done.  Well, it’s time for some of that hate.  If you don’t want to hear me bitch, I strongly suggest that you click the little ‘X’ in the top-right of your computer screen right now.

I’m not sure how much longer I can do this shit.  And you might be surprised, but it’s not the heat, or the coal dust, or the constant physical ass-kickings I take on a consistent basis that are making me want to tell my boss, and this job, to kiss my ass.  More than that, it’s spending about half my life in hotel rooms being an incredibly lonely, incredibly single 26-year-old that has me asking myself how much longer I should be doing this.  I’m so tired of watching life pass me by.  It’s harder than it sounds.  When normal people go to the airport, a loved one drops them off.  Not me, I drive myself.  Normal people get picked up by someone they care about, not me, I drive myself back to my empty-ass apartment.  I know.  It seems fucking insane to bitch about being paid to travel the world.  But trust me on this, it’s harder than it sounds.  I miss people.  A lot.  I hate getting home to DIA to see some pretty girl rush into the arms of the lucky bastard that’s waiting for her.  I go and retrieve my toolbox and my suitcase and stroll out to my truck and carry on just like I never left.  I guess flying 70 times a year makes it so common-place that I feel like no one gives a shit when I come or go. 

Sure, I’ve seen some amazing things in my travels…  

Like this:

Kölner Dom in Cologne, Germany. The largest gothic cathedral in Europe, and for a time, the tallest structure in the world.

And this:
 

The Louvre. Pretty damn impressive, and huge. Way bigger than it looks.

And this:

La Tour Eiffel – Not as tall as I expected but still iconic as hell, glad I can say I’ve stood on top of it.

And, in a week or two, I take off for a week in China and two weeks in South Korea.  Pretty awesome, but I guess I’m getting to the point where I want someone with whom to share all this more than I want to continue to see the world.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly thankful for all the experiences.  And I’m fully aware of how lucky I am to have had these opportunities.  But it’s getting hard to do it on my own.  Maybe Kentucky’s just getting to me, or the fact that I’m working in the single worst work site I’ve seen in my life, but I’m lonely, and tired.  And as of right now, I’m feeling more like going back to school than I’m feeling like going to Asia.  I’d rather spend 180 nights a year with someone special than spend 180 nights in hotel rooms travelling around on my own.  I do know how crazy that sounds, but all I can say is try it.  For 3 and half years.  You’d be surprised how Paris means less to you than people you love.   

 
I bet I’ll feel better in the morning.  That’s all for now. 
 
- B. Littleton

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Filed under The Road, The Sights

June 7, 2011 · 8:01 pm

Awww Shit. Part Deux.


Well, just finished our seventh straight day of working in Hell.  We’ve put in over 80 hours in those seven days, and it’s now official, I’m not coming home Friday as scheduled.  Instead I get the pleasure of staying over till Monday night and working through my second straight weekend.  TGIF, or whatever.

The Unit 5 smoke stack at Cane Run. My view from the roof.

Below all this is a little slideshow that might paint a better picture, because I’m pretty sure I’ve cooked my brain retarded.  It’s hard to spell my name right now, let alone form coherent sentences…  But I’ll give it a shot. 

This trip has been fucking brutal.  And coming from me, that means a lot.  I’ve grown pretty accustomed to this, well, as accustomed as one can get to working in these absurd conditions.  But this job takes the cake.  This has been the single worst, scariest, hottest, dirtiest and most dangerous job I’ve been on in my 3-and-a-half-years of doing this shit, with my visit to this plant last summer taking a close second.  I’ve never had to be so continuously exposed to the heat and the filth.  A lot of our sites have a certain spot or two that are as hot as the crap I’ve been dealing with out here, but they also have spots where it’s a mere 100 degrees and I can cool down a bit.  Not Cane Run.  The coolest place I’ve found in our work area is 130 degrees.  After almost killing us out here last year, my boss consented to send ice-vests (they’re just what they sound like, vests with pockets for ice packs that you strap to your chest) and a small tent with a portable air conditioner.  The ice-vests help, but they generate an incredibly unique sensation.  Strapping five pounds of ice to my chest while my shirt is soaked is fucking freezing.  Then I get up to the boiler where it’s 170 degrees, and my torso feels frostbitten, while the rest of me feels medium-rare.  It’s an incredibly weird feeling.  We set up the tent and a/c on the roof of the plant, up one flight of stairs from our work area.  It was wonderful for a time, and provided us with a nice 65 degree area in which to recover from our repeated forays into the underworld.  However, the a/c died on us yesterday, so now the best ‘break’ we can get is outside where it’s 95, sunny and humid.  Twice now I’ve run to the roof feeling nauseous from the heat.  I’ve dry heaved a couple of times, but so far so good on the whole not puking thing.  My co-worker Glen has been having the same problems. 

Any who, we work right next to the boiler, and the boiler is structurally contained by very large I-beams known as buckstays (why they’re called that I couldn’t tell you).  These are physically in contact with the boiler wall, and are quite conductive of the heat.  We have to stand on these things to work on our crap, and it’s so hot the soles of my boots have started to melt.  As I mentioned in the first Awww Shit post, I sweat more than I ever thought possible while I’m doing this, and yesterday I looked down to where my sweat was dripping out of my hard hat, and take my word on this one, my sweat was immediately boiling on contact with the buckstay.  Absolutely unreal. 

The adverse health effects of working here are starting to get to me too.  I have the usual sore back and stiff legs, but I get those after working 12 hours anywhere.  What I don’t normally do is develop rashes all over my body from being completely soaked with a combination of sweat and condensation from the ice-vests.  It’s so dusty here that my clothes turn into this muddy concoction of awful, grimy, stinky fabric, which then rubs me raw just about everywhere.  My right armpit (not the left one strangely enough) is breaking out in hives, leaving me with a delightful decision: do I not wear deodorant and smell so horrible that a Haz-Mat crew has to follow me around, or do I put some on and irritate my little rash…  My face looks like that of a hardcore pubescent 16-year-old.  I think this is from wiping sweat off my face like 3,000 times a day with my ash-and-dust-infused shirt sleeves.  It’s pretty sweet. 

Just to add to the fun, a lot of the tools and equipment that we use to install these measurement systems are malfunctioning due to the heat and dust.  For instance, we have a fusion splicer, a pretty neat and quite expensive (like luxury sedan expensive) little machine that uses an arc, not unlike a welder, to melt two fiber optic lines together.  The fiber we use is smaller than a hair on your head, so as you can imagine it’s a pretty sensitive machine.  Yesterday, I broke the shit out of our splicer by dripping sweat right onto the electrodes it uses to make the arc.  The only thing worse than working in these conditions is having to work in them with malfunctioning equipment. 

That being said, we’re getting there.  We should only have to work five more days, and the majority of one of those days will be installing a new laser in the system, and to do that we get to work where it’s climate controlled and heavenly.  Bites about losing my weekend, but unfortunately I’m pretty accustomed to that too.  And it means a shitload of overtime, which almost, almost makes it worthwhile.  Ok, in this instance it totally doesn’t make it worthwhile, but I’m going to continue to believe that it does so I stand a chance of getting out of bed in the morning.  

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Until next time,

-B. Littleton

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Filed under The Sights, The Work

June 5, 2011 · 11:04 pm

Scott, the tree-trimmer from Jersey


So I’ve talked a fair amount about all the interesting people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting over the course of my travels, but as of yet I’ve mentioned exactly none of them.  Tucked away in the dark and dusty corners of my noodle, there are several encounters with several people whose stories I’d love to share.  And tonight, I met another.  Rather than waiting for a nice, relaxing opportunity to write about him, I’m just gonna stay up late, write about him now, and then regret the shit out of it tomorrow…

So I was lying in bed drinking a delicious, ice-cold Newcastle and chatting with a good college friend of mine, a Mr. James Fiebeger, about, predictably enough, ways to promote this here blog.  I decided to head out front of the hotel to smoke.  While I was sitting there, I had the pleasure of meeting Scott, a tree-trimmer from New Jersey (hey, that’s the title of this post, weird…). 

Scott and I shared a few beers, smoked a few cigarettes, and told each other the stories of how we ended up here; sitting on the curb outside the Comfort Inn in southwestern Louisville, Kentucky.  You’ve already heard about my story, but certainly not his.  He grew up in Jersey, and after a stint in rehab, for what he didn’t mention, he met a girl on the internet that lived in Indiana.  He moved there to be with her, they had a kid together, and have since split.  (An aside: I’m gonna recount our conversation straight up, there were parts of his story I thought were bullshit, and parts I could tell were completely true, but I’ll tell you what he told me, and you can make whatever decisions and judgements you’d like).  Scott’s been climbing trees (as he put it) for 15 years now, and was “one of the top three tree-climbers in Indiana.”  He followed work to Louisville, and does all he can to make money to support his son.  He visits him twice a month, work permitting, and supports his ex-wife financially as best he can. 

Last year, on mother’s day, Scott took a 30 foot fall out of a tree in which he was working.  He hit his arm on the roof of the nearby house on the way down and broke it in twelve places (his arm, not the house, that would be hard).  When he hit the ground his leg broke in eight places.  Ok, I said I’d be impartial, but I totally thought this was bullshit, untill he showed me the E.R. pictures on his phone and the correlating scars.  He was pretty torn up.  Morphine wasn’t enough, and he was on some painkiller that was even stronger (I didn’t know such a medication existed, and I’m not ashamed to say I’m damn happy about that).  The doctors couldn’t decide whether or not to amputate, and were arguing about it when his co-worker showed up at the E.R. and explained that Scott climbed trees for a living, so removing his leg would be removing his livelihood.  They consented to insert titanium rods in his right leg and left arm and bolted all the bone fragments to the rods.  They warned of infection, saying that if it struck, it would all but require amputation for his survival. He came out of it ok, and is back at the tree-trimming business he clearly loves. 

Now, Scott was uninsured at the time of the accident.  His doctors told him he’d need months of physical therapy to keep his muscles from weakening, and without it he would eventually lose the ability to move his leg.  They also stated it would be over a year before he would walk unassisted again.  He went back to Jersey to stay with his parents and blew through his savings paying his child support.  Without insurance, the medical bills and his disability-induced unemployment meant he couldn’t afford the physical therapy sessions recommended to him.  Instead, he spent four hours a day walking up and down his parents’ driveway assisted by walkers and canes.  After four months he was able to climb his first tree, and returned to Kentucky for work, and is once again trimming trees and supporting his son. 

This was a cool story to hear, and dude was a good guy to chat with.  It was quite clear that all else aside, he cared deeply for his son, and he knew that without his leg he couldn’t provide for the child or the child’s mother.  I got the impression (aided by his pictures) that he wasn’t shitting me with his tales.  You can make your own calls about it, but from my perspective, it was a fun 45 minutes chatting with the guy.  And to think, if it wasn’t for a nicotine craving, I’d never have met him…  Remarkable…

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Filed under Oh, The People You'll Meet...