November 4 2020

Rode my mountain bike into work today, worked a day shift: Water Treatment Plant and then rode back home in the afternoon.

I'm having a good run with my bike lately.

Been riding to and from work consistently for over a week now. Without issues. It's been great.

Except last Friday when I had a massive stack.

Cuts, grazes and bruising all up my right side. Knee, hip, elbow, shoulder. And strangely, the bridge of my nose, with a small cut...

But, aside from all that, it's been good. The bike took the punishment without problems.

I'll have to drive in tomorrow, because it'll be dark when I start and I have a tight schedule to keep during the day.

I'm starting early, at 6 AM, to discharge 2 presses at the Sludge Plant, which will take about 2 hours.

After that, I'm heading down to the local TAFE SA campus at Tonsley for some training until lunch at midday.

(The theory)

After lunch, we're heading back to the WTP where I work, as a group, for the practical portion of the module.

The training is called 'Solids Handling' which means, sludge processing.

I'm not sure what the practical will actually involve, but I'll find that out tomorrow.

I was considering riding in, riding down to the training and then riding back for the practical, but then I made something of an error...

More like, a promise to help someone that I respect, without really thinking it through...

Do you ever have moments like these?

So here I was, finishing up discharging a press at the Sludge Plant. It's an intensive and manual job. I had about 6 plates to go by this point, having done 138 already.

These plates measure roughly two square metres each and 'discharging' means to scrape the dewatered sludge off, which falls to a conveyor belt below.

I look up and there's a bloke standing on the other side of the machine. I know him. He's the team leader of the Mechanical Fitter group at the WTP.

I've known him for over a year now and have great respect for him. Truth be told, I look up to him.

Possibly for his strong leadership skills, technical knowledge and his ability to maintain a sense of humour in the face of enormous pressure, among other things.

I can't say I know him all that well, but I can tell from speaking to him that he's a decent bloke.

Even though we work in different areas of the plant — he's in Maintenance and I'm in Operations — we often need to work together and coordinate our efforts to get things done.

So essentially, he's a top bloke and I'm happy to help him out whenever I can.

So I say g'day, ask how he's going.

He asks when the other press, the one I wasn't discharging, will be ready for discharge.

It was pressing at the time, which is what takes place before the discharging is required.

(Apologies if this is hard to follow — it's technical stuff, and I mean that in the least pretentious way possible)

It's a two-part process with these presses.

A thickened sludge/water mix is pumped through the press, which is lined with fine-pored industrial cloth on each plate, this filters the sludge (which remains in the press) from the water (which carries through, back to the thickeners).

Right, so this was late in the afternoon, about 3 PM. It takes 4 to 5 hours for one press cycle to complete.

It won't be ready til the morning.

He tells me that there's a bloke coming in tomorrow and he needs to see that press functioning in a different mode: 'clothwash'.

In this, a high-pressure manifold moves up and down along each each plate, spraying intense jets of water into each cloth to clean them.

This needs doing every 4-5 press cycles, otherwise the efficiency of the machine decreases dramatically and it takes much, much longer to discharge them.

This cannot be done when the plates are loaded up with dewatered sludge, it has to happen after a discharge and before the next press cycle.

The reason this other bloke (haven't met him) is coming onsite and needs to see the clothwash in action, is because the Mech Team Leader designed the system himself and retrofitted it to these two presses.

It consists of a fairly sophisticated series of rotating knuckles in the water delivery pipework from the high-pressure pump to the clothwash manifold.

This was news to me. I didn't know he had designed it. That was obviously before I started in the company.

So this other bloke is coming along tomorrow to inspect this system as part of the Mech Team Leader going for a reclassification.

This is essentially a payrise: a reclassification of a person's job title to a higher level within the path of their qualification.

However, it's not automatic and is conditional on completing work befitting the higher level.

Hence, the need to show the system he designed actually working, among other things.

I am of the understanding that the reclassification process for a tradesperson is quite intensive in this company.

...

Okay, so I say to the Mech Team Leader, sure thing. Tomorrow morning, I'll be discharging that press as planned first thing and it should be ready by about 9 AM, as long as there's no problems.

Mech Team Leader had only been informed just before seeing me that this other bloke was coming in tomorrow.

Very short notice.

Which happens all the time in this company, unfortunately.

...

Okay, if you've kept up so far, and congratulations if you have as this post has practically become a novel, you may have noticed something wrong here...

And it didn't hit me until I'd finished for the day and was walking back to the main plant to get my bike to go home:

Tomorrow is not a normal day. I'm at training in the morning, at another location entirely and I won't be back here til after midday and at that time I'll be involved in the practical training for the rest of the day

_{Ah shit...}

So no discharging presses tomorrow.

Which is the opposite of what I just said.

What to do... What to do....

Ask somebody else to do it? Everyone else is busy and nobody is realistically going to do it.

(Trust me)

Call the Mech Team Leader and explain that I'd completely forgotten about my training while speaking to him?

Well, maybe that's the rational thing to do, but I didn't want to do that. I guess it's an ego thing. Not wanting to explain how I forgot what I was actually doing tomorrow. Force of habit where I assumed tomorrow was like any other day at the Sludge Plant, I suppose.

Habitual thinking.

It's funny because I was proactively organising this training earlier in the week. And yet, at this critical moment, I completely forgot about it.

Damn

...

So this is why I'm starting at 6 AM tomorrow morning, so I can get the press discharged before my training.

...

Life...

...

Thanks for reading.

See you tomorrow 👍