November 9 2020

Hi folks,

The weekend is over, back to work for another week. Did you have a good one?

I rode my bike in this morning, worked a day shift: Water Treatment Plant, but instead of riding home, I drove home with the plant ute, my bike tied down on the back. I also discharged two filter presses during the day, a workout in itself.

I'm now on-call for the next 7 days. If any critical issues occur at the plant after hours, the control system will send an alert to my work phone and I'm required to respond.

Alarms that 'page out' in this way run the gamut from simple things like electro-pneumatically operated valves not reached their limits while opening or closing, to more complicated machine breakdowns like slaker faults or filter shutdowns.

This can happen at any time of the night. The plant runs 24/7 producing drinking water for the city.

If there's a breakdown at 2 AM that requires site attendance to fix, then I will need to drive in.

It wouldn't make a lot of sense to rely on my bike, even though it only takes half an hour to ride to work. Some situations are so time critical that every minute counts.

Besides, I don't want to ride into work in the dark at 2AM.

So my bike will remain parked for the next 7 days. Which is a bit sad, but duty calls.

It was really warm here today. We've been running the plant hard: a constant 370 million litres per day, to keep up with the demand for water.

This will continue tomorrow too. Weather forecast is 36℃ max.

...

Well time for sleep.