Early morning

This Saturday I will be batching 1200 cu yds of concrete. Not sure what the regular batch guy is doing, but they asked me. I'm fine with it, because it'll be a full day of overtime. Unfortunately, the concrete has to be on the job by 5am, so I have to arrive at the office at 4am. And to do get out 1200 cu yds, there would be a constant stream of trucks. So I won't have time to nap in-between trucks. I may not even have time to play FFIII, (I finally beat FFTA the last week.) I figure if we're starting at 5am, we'll probably go for at least 10 hours. I honestly don't know how many tons of concrete the plant can produce in an hour.

Tomorrow is the office cook out, too bad our resident BBQ expert quit last month. The office assistant has spent the past couple of days shopping and cleaning the grill. It was quite rusty, I hope it'll be safe to eat off of.

Respecting others

So my Respecting others in the workplaces was yesterday. Luckily there was another today in Hutchinson. I just thought they moved to Hutchinson class to Wichita, but they made an additional class a day earlier. The class was good and he showed a different video from last year. I talked with a instructor a little since it was my 2nd time in a row. It's normally required once every 3 years. He was looking for a minority engineer to help out with a seminar he gives. When he asked our metro engineer, if he knew anyone, he suggested our female engineer. Which is fine by me, I'm not sure I'd want to participate, nor give the typical answers he was expecting. Though it would get me out of the office.

My boss sent out the project staffing for this years projects. I will have a Senior, the Filipino chemical engineer, helping me out. Which is good a thing, I probably get along with him best after the other engineer. Tomorrow is the letting day for my emergency bridge repair project. I'll finally get more information regarding start times. Hopefully it won't interfere with my trip to Japan.

calculations

Another boring day at work. I actually started reading the construction manual. This document has some useful information, unfortunately I don't learn well from books. I have about 1.5 months to prepare for my first project. My boss actually took me off as a helper on another project so I can focus on this. He finally told me to calculate the concrete quantities at the end of the day, so I'll save it for something to do tomorrow after my "Respecting others in the workplace" class. There'll be 3 of us from our office. Myself, the other engineer, and the new technician. The new technician seems to have done more work in his first week, than I did in my first two months. It really feel like I'm the only person in the office not working.

FEMA

Got an email from our KDOT safety officer wanting everyone to complete this FEMA NIMS (National Incident Management System) online course. Had to take two very boring and easy courses. Both were basically introductions to the system. The first course took me about 4 hours, because I kept getting distracted every 10 minutes. The second covered a lot of the same material, and I was able to focus, so it only took me like 1 hour.

The game filter didn't originally catch my main site for FFXI information ffxiclopedia.org, but it finally got blocked today. I was actually reading something on the site, then I click on linked and got the dreaded messaged. Normally when you get that message you're supposed to email your boss to explain your actions. Since I wasn't supposed to be at the site in the first place, I'll just hope I don't get flagged.

We apparently have a new employee. I know we had several people leave, but I don't remember a position ever being opened up. I check the State employment site regularly out of boredom and to find a job for my friend. This new guy seems late 20's, early 30's. I noticed the skoal in his back pocket, so I'm expecting him to be like the average KDOT employee. I wonder if he'll become the new concrete batch guy, since that's reserved for the bottom of the totem pole. The last three employees that left, that didn't retire, were the current batch guys. They just spent the past two weeks our new one, so I wonder if they'll go through the trouble again.

gradations

Whether we use asphalt or concrete, the aggregate has to be tested. For asphalt is has to be test every 1000 tons, for concrete it's every 250 tons. You have to run moisture tests and sieve analysis. Technically the material is to be tested before it goes on the job. Since in Wichita, we normally only do concrete, gradations is the responsiblilty of the concrete guy. Appareently the last concrete guys didn't run enough tests, so now we have to run tests after the fact. They had me in the lab running tests along with another ET. Eventually they left me alone running tests, which is simple enough, but I'm not certified to run them. I don't go to the aggregate testing class until April.