Noisy rain

No work due to weather. It was really bad too, thunder storms and hail. We have an opaque sun room thing on our office, and I'm right under it. It really amplifies the sound of rain. So when it rains hard it's almost deafening in the office. Since there's no work, we're all stuck in the office. And someone behind me needs some headphones. They've be listening to music for a while.

So they added Friday night to make for missing two days. And now we're not working tonight with more storms expected for tomorrow. The contractor should just cancel the whole week and stay in Missouri. That way I won't have to use my vacation time this Friday.

Woohoo! It's Thursday

This Sunday-Thursday schedule is nice. Since next Monday is Memorial Day, we get Sunday and Monday night off. So it's a four day weekend for me. To make up for the short work week, we agreed to let the contractor work on Friday night of that week, so that makes next weekend only a one day weekend. I'm actually taking that Friday off to attend a friend's wedding.

The project manager finally came back after taking 2 weeks off sick. The second project of our office is supposed to start in June, so they'll pull the Black guy off this one, and leave me in charge of the batch plant. At this point, they made my job easier. We've been having problems with the amount of air in our mix, so now the guys out on the field will make the adjustments. I'm not sure how well that will work, since the guys out there don't know anything. We started the with the B mix, which sucked so we switched to the A mix, which was working. The contractor was happy, but the State wasn't happy with the results of the air test, so we switched back to the B mix yesterday. After 3 truck loads, we made the decision to switch back to the A, because it looked like crap, and they still weren't getting good air results. Hopefully we'll stick with the A mix, and the rest of the project will run smoothly. And yes that is what we called them A and B mix.

More accidents

One of mixer drivers told me that two nights ago there was another accident on the project. Someone driving a Grand-Am/Prix went through traffic control and ran into some slabs on concrete in the middle of the road. We do partial and full-depth patching. On full depth patches, they cut all the way down to the base and lift out the slabs with a backhoe used as a crane. These slabs are around 8-10 inches thick and are usually 6X3 feet. They're pretty easy to spot even in at night. So the driver must have been drunk. This is our third accident in under 4 weeks.

Message boards

Last night, one of the messages board that we use to inform the public stopped working. Since my truck is one of the few trucks with a hitch, I got the privilege to haul it back, and pick up another one. I must say it is difficult to back a message board into a space. Luckily someone else was there to do it for me after a few minutes of failing. There was one message board at our office, but it was locked and had the wrong type of trailer. Then we went to the north office, but the board there was broken. Hopefully one of them got fixed and is back on the road.

Nothing

As far as I know my only job is to work in the batch plant. So I decided that one day I'll stay in the office until it's to batch concrete. The next day I get an email from my boss telling me not to do that anymore. I wasn't planning on doing at anymore anyways. I was planning on sitting in the office until 8pm, drive out to the project, see what was accomplished, then head the plant at 9pm. But since I got this email, I guess I'll go out at 7pm. My co-worker seem to think I don't do anything, because when I'm out on the road, I just walk up and down the project. For the most part, I'm not doing anything, except getting exercise. I only do what I am told to do, which has been nothing.

There are no lines of communication between me and my co-workers, except the black guy who's in the plant with me. It's nice because he tells me what the others think about me, which is good because I need the feedback. Though from the way he explains it, it seems that they resent me. I was originally put in the plant to be out of the way of the project manager, but the others think I should be out there with them. I personally prefer the plant, because there are things to do there. Plus there is communication there, and it lets me see how negligent and incompetent my fellow workers are. Though the more I listen to the black guy the more I'll begin to despise my boss and co-workers on this project. Oh well, I don't really need to care what they think, because I'll become their superior soon enough.

Locked out

I got locked out of my laptop yesterday. Apparently I typed my password incorrectly three times, which locked me out. I had to come during the day today and get my password changed.
I found out that despite having a DVD drive, my laptop won't play DVD's. That spoils my plans to watch Wonderfalls and Buffy. At least I can still watch Firefly.

I finally got my Personal Protection Equipment yesterday. It just sitting on my desk in a giant plastic sack. So now I have a closet full of bright orange shirts. Oddly enough only three people in this office wears orange. Unlike the office where I interned last summer where everyone wore orange, and I was only people that wore the vest. But I guess working nights, you have to wear the vest anyways because of the reflectors so wearing orange makes no difference.

I'm no longer working out on the road, I'm in the concrete plant full-time now. I get less hours, because the plant shuts down at 2am, but I'm actually doing work, so I don't mind it. I'm learning more in there than out there, since the black guy explains a lot of things to me. This also gives me time to sit down and read. I finally finished Ender's Game, and have started on Metaplanetary. After one chapter, I put it down, because I hate reading Sci-Fi with made up words. Idoru was hard enough for me to read, this seems like it'll be more annoying. I recently received a large shipment of manga, so I'll read those.

Last week, we had another accident. One of our guys was sitting in his suburban and was hit by a drunk driver. He seems to be alright, but he's not allowed to drive at the moment, so he's causing a stinking about not being able to do his job and that he should be sent home. It's not like his job is that difficult. I don't really care since I'm not out there with them anymore.

Fish

Finally got to work again after three rain days. There isn't much for me to do until after 10pm when we start pouring concrete. Until then I just walk around watching various parts of the projects. Often I'll sit on the barrier wall and look at the canal. Today I finally realized that there's fish swimming in there. I could see a bunch of them swimming upstream close to the surface. I didn't think fish lived in there, because it's a filthy body of water. All the run-off from the highway goes in there. And now all the slurry water is running in there.

There was a bit of excitement on the job. Apparently a drunk teenage girl took out one of the light poles on the job. This was around 8pm too, this is exactly why we don't work on Friday nights. The girl didn't seem to be hurt because she was taken away in a police car. I was about half a mile from the site, all I could see were the lights.

I actually stayed to about 5am this morning, since there's less people working now, I don't feel so bad staying on the job late.

Seven Samurai

Another day without working. I got the call at 2:30pm, so I came in at 3:30pm, and I brought Seven Samurai with me. It's a nice long 3.5 hour movie. I've been trying to watch more TV shows and avoiding reading books. I figure I should save them for when I'm out on the field.

I had my 3 month evaluation today. It was satisfactory, because there wasn't much to base it on. The last page of the evaluation had a list of goals for me. It's nice to finally have a purpose. The goals were to learn pay quantities, become familiar with the database program we use, and levels of acceptance which means deciding if a product is good enough for us to pay for. After this project, I'm apparently going to put on more 402's (estimates).

During this evaluation, I found out that were finally getting another engineer in this office. It's a woman from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, and she's coming June 5th. She's EA2, and apparently already has her PE. I think my boss might have the PE mixed up with the FE, because someone with a PE wouldn't be a EA2, they'd be something higher. I heard about a woman coming into our office a month ago, and she was be our EA3, Construction Engineer. I'm an EA1, and I automatically become an EA2 after one year of work.

Not working

Thursday night, I was put in the concrete plant to observe our batch man. We don't start batching concrete until after 10pm, with is when we close off the second lane. So before that I was on site walking around just to get some exercise. I walked to the beginning of the project, stood there talking to some co-workers watched work be done. The workers moved on, but we stayed put for another 30 minutes. I decided I would at least pretend to watch the work, and figured the others would follow, but nope. So i continued to walk about 3 miles to the other end of the project, stopping to watch a little work. Then 10pm rolled around and I was whisked away to the plant.

Being at the plant actually feel a little like work. You only work when a truck is needed, and that's like 7-8 times in 4 hours. The batch man actually makes decision, making adjustments to mix. After the truck is loaded, a ticket is written, then the batch man goes out and looks into mixer to see how wet or dry the mix is. The batch man for this project is the token black guy, so it wasn't too bad working there. I left work at 3am that night, since I didn't feel like looking for pretend work to do.

Friday night, work was canceled. I came in at 4pm, because I felt it would be canceled. So I sat in the office for about an hour, decided to take 4 hours of vacation and left. Despite working 10 hours some days, still only ended up with 40 hours for the week. I still made more money because of the night differential pay.

One of the sub-contractors got the work changed to the way we wanted. We originally wanted to Sun-Thurs, since Friday night would have too much traffic and drunks. The main contractor decided Mon-Fri, and sadly at KDOT, the first rule is to not make the contractor angry. Luckily the sub-contractor in charge of concrete saw things our way, and got the schedule changed. So my weekend was only Saturday this week.

So I'm here at work on Sunday, and surprise surprise it was canceled, but I'm still required to put in 8 hours, so I'm stuck here until midnight. Thankfully, I was called beforehand and was able to plan for the night of doing nothing. When my boss called, he asked if I wanted to come in or take more vacation time. I've only been here for less 3 months, so I don't have much vacation time to use. When I came in today, I was planning on doing nothing, so I forgot to change into my boots. I'm still wearing my flip flops, and I don't really have any intentions on changing.

I hate the cold

So we didn't work yesterday because of expected thunderstorms, which never happened. So we worked today and it did rain, very hard at some points. I brought my jacket and stocking cap, but I was still very cold. Working on rainy highway, next to a river with the wind constantly blowing made for a crappy time. Luckily I was under a bridge for the wetter parts of the night.

The first night, they just sawed patches. Tonight, they pulled out the full depths patches, and jack hammered the partial ones. After that, the full depth patches had dowel bars inserted. Finally they were filled with concrete and finished. They moved like an assembly line. So that's what the contractor did. So what did I do? I watched them work. At one point we ran a concrete test and I wrote down the results. I did a maximum of 5 minutes of work in 12 hours, 4pm to 4am. There were seven people out there doing the work of four. I spent most of my time talking with my coworkers, which is nice since I finally get to know them better.

I doubt I'll ever work until 6am. Since the road has to be opened by 6am, the latest the contractor can pour concrete is 2am. So after 2am, it's just waiting around on the contractor. They may continue to saw some more patches for the next day, or they might just pack up and call it a night. We basically have to stick around and make sure they clean everything up, but that doesn't require everyone, so a couple guys "volunteer" to stay, and the rest of us go home. I actually just sat in my truck from 2am to 3:30am, doing sudoku and trying to sleep.

well, damn

Due to expected nightly thunderstorms, the contractor doesn't plan on working tonight. Which means there's nothing for us to do, but we're still required to put in 8 hours of "work." I worked 4 hours earlier, and since I decided to come in at 6pm, I gotta stay until 10pm. I thought about maybe coming in at 4pm like yesterday, but laziness and FFXI won over. Hmm, had I stay until 6am, and arrived at 4pm, I could have been off of work by now. I didn't bring my HD, but I at least have my book and DS.

I just blue myself

We finished early this morning, I so decided to update. After sitting in the office until a little after 7pm, I decided to walk around the office. I noticed that it was completely empty. You'd think they would let me know when they were leaving for the job site. So I turned off the lights, then locked the doors and headed out to the job site.

When I got there at 7:20pm, the contractor had just started setting up the traffic control to close off the left lane. So I wasted about 20 minutes talking, then drove back to the office to grab a measuring wheel, pencil, and my lunch box. Tonight, we just marked off patches. Orange paint for full depth and blue paint for partial depth patches. There was seven of us out there which was more than enough. It was highly unorganized. We each took a section of the southbound 4 mile stretch, but we weren't told how to label patches. I think we started marking then at 8:30pm and finished left lane by 10pm. The center lane was supposed to be closed off by 10pm, but that wasn't done until 11:30pm. We went through and marked the center lane patches and relabeled the left lanes patches to a uniform standard. Center lane was probably done by 2am, but since there is little communication better the workers, we overlapped on sections that were already covered. But that was okay, because some sections needed to be checked twice. While we were marking patches, the contractor was sawing them so they could be pulled out in the future.

At 3:00am, everyone was gathered at the end of project. I just sat in the truck talking, until the project manager dismissed us. He said we were free to leave now or stick around until 6am. I figured I've already been working for 12 hours, I don't want two more. So after 30 more minutes of chatting, people started heading back to the office. A couple guys stayed behind to make sure traffic control was taken down. On the way back, I saw a bunch of police cars, a fire truck, and a couple radio station news vans, but I didn't see any accident. Even though I was just driving down a 4 mile stretch, drove up and down it a lot looking for things to do, I think I put over 50 miles on my truck tonight. I forgot to ask what time I need to come in this afternoon, but I'm going to assume 6pm, since I already got 4 hours today.

Begin

I had to come in at 4pm today. We grabbed supplies for concrete testing, and that's all that I have done in the past 1.5 hours. There's about four of us in the office waiting, while the others do something with signs. Because of this project, I probably won't be spending much time in the office. Haven't decided if I will continue to update this blog as often. It was one thing to update it on company time, but to use my own time to write this. Maybe I'll just do it on Monday's, I'm assuming they'll make us come in early on Mondays to get the 8 hours. But every time I make an assumption with KDOT, I've been wrong.

It has been difficult to adjust my schedule to nights. I've been going to bed at 5am, but I still wake up at 9:30-10am, and force myself to sleep until noon. I think my body craves the sun. There is one benefit of working nights, I get paid an extra $1/hr, so that'll probably be at least an extra $240 month.