Work-A-Day World, Part III

(Originally written 25 January 2010, 17:28 Central Time)

I had originally intended to do one entry a week, but there comes those days where the day is interesting enough to warrant an entry for that day alone. (Yes, I’m sure you can imagine that today was interesting.)

It started right off the bat with a building just down the street getting gutted by a fire. No word on exactly what happened. But the building was abandoned, with no security. I blame teenagers. Me and Tesla decided to take a closer look on our drive to work – and promptly got lost. This was a particular trouble, as Atikokan doesn’t seem to have much in the way of local snow removal, and what was on the ground was heavy and unwilling to move. As resilient as our German Workhorse is, it very nearly met its match today.

It finally did get stuck, though – right in the parking lot of the factory. So, at least we got there. Our third roommate, Lazarus, wasn’t so lucky. He had been in Thunder Bay overnight, and couldn’t find a safe way (or any way) back. He wasn’t the only one, too; even the big boss, Pellet, was stuck in Thunder Bay as well.

And what a day for it to happen, too. Just before lunch, someone from the Ministry of Labour walked up and down the backs of everyone in the plant – except me, thankfully. I was stuck on the roof of a control shed nearly fifteen feet off the ground, and out of his reach. (Yes, me the acrophobic.) Finally rescued after twenty minutes, we had a quick lunch, and got back at it.

Then the real fun began. Back to the control shed, Tesla told me to get to work on chopping out the cabling under the shed. The first cable I hit: 240 volts, 20 amps – and very much alive. One second, things are just starting to settle down, the next I’m getting a face full of sparks and arc-welding a groove out of the huge cable cutters we were using. Yes, I’m alright, or I wouldn’t be writing this. Needless to say, I forced Tesla to test every cable before I cut it, or simply have him do it himself. So it was him that cut the next live cable.

Now, here’s the problem: every time you chop through a live power cable, you get a shower of sparks as the power flowing through the wire gets grounded on the metal sheathing. Slightly less often, but fairly frequent as I understand, the plastic covering on the cable can catch fire. So, there’s me and Tesla, staring at the end of this cable, screaming for a fire extinguisher while a back corner of my mind was absently thinking of marshmallows.

Thankfully, the fire was isolated to a chunk of cable coming down into the crawl space below the shed, and no flaming blobs of plastic dropped into the piles of sawdust below. It didn’t burn long enough to catch the wooden shed on fire. We hit it with a couple blasts of carbon dioxide, and it was out in seconds. So, no megalithic explosions today – I get to see another sunrise.

And if this is a foretelling of what this week will be like, Heaven help me. One day down, three still to go.