The Work-A-Day World, Part IV

First off, to Hell and brimstone with having my system on Central Time - I'm the only person in town that's even using it. Yes, Atikokan is 100+ kilometres from the Eastern/Central border, but no one here seems to give a damn. And despite my reputation of not following the crowd, if no one else is going to use it, why should I?

Yes, I'm in a mood. The work week is half over, yes. Thursday morning (probably about 01:30) I'll be getting paid, yes. This will most likely be the largest pay cheque I've ever seen, thank God yes. It was just that crummy a day. No explosions, no fires, no serious injuries requiring hospitalizations, no live power cables scaring the living hell out of me... just work. Though I suppose I should start off where it really began, that being yesterday.

A head cold. I was all but stopped in my tracks by a head cold. My nose weighed a ton, I was getting cold chills every five milliseconds - I half-wondered if I had the flu, to be honest. Needless to say, I felt like death warmed over. And I still put in a full day of work. Last night, felt just as under the weather - and I couldn't sleep. Hail the return of my immortal companion, Insomnia.

So today, with only three or four hours of sleep (you'd think I'd be used to it by now) it was back to cutting cables and dragging them off to be packed and sent overseas. Not so bad, I've done it before. That is, until they started taking off the metal panelling from the floor to expose the cabling trenches - those were our next job.

I've probably described them before, but let me re-iterate: three feet deep, a foot wide, and 90% of the cables in them are at the bottom, underneath two full feet of sawdust, with just enough of the cables sticking up through the sawdust (most of them for no reason; they come up to the surface at one point, only to trail back down to the bottom) that simply shovelling out the trenches would be tedious at best. And the vacuums we have at the plant are about a decade old, and on their last legs.

Of course, that situation would be a blessing, because it doesn't include frequent flooding of those trenches to transform decades-old sawdust into a consistency somewhere between wet bundles of newspaper and Lake Erie clay. I think you see where this is going.

So, two hours go by, with minimal progress and maximum effort, when we get new orders. Because hauling these cables out is being such a bastardly task (something everyone there predicted months ago) we were to just put the metal panelling back in place and be shot of the whole thing. No major thing, right? We just take every last cable that we've fought tooth and nail to get exposed to open air for the time in my lifetime and bury the whole rat's nest once again.

Suffice it to say, no one was happy. We were looking at digging out sawdust manually to make room for these cables to go back in, which we all knew would take forever. Then, the magic words come across from one of my co-workers: "Hey, isn't there that 200 horsepower vacuum cleaner in the back somewhere? That thing's pretty damn new - it shouldn't have a problem dealing with this!"

Side Note: I restrained myself from killing anyone for overlooking that vacuum previously.