How hot is it?

I’m in the air conditioning now.  I’ve showered and had supper and have finally started to get some energy back.  What have I been doing?  Working.  I’ve said how we’ve gone to 12 hour days now, what I haven’t told you it was I really do.

Where I work, we anodize aluminum.  I work up on the anodizing line, which means I work on the line where we actually anodize the aluminum.  So I work with all kinds of chemicals, all day long.  I takes 6 weeks to train to do my job.  There are only 3 position on each shift for my job.  And it’s the highest paid (not that it’s enough) in the plant as far as line positions go.  In October I will have been there for 13 years.  12 of those up on this line.  I have the most line experience up there by far, the next person probably has half the experience.  I am around 40th position on the seniority list.  That’s just a guess because a lot of people quit when we went to 12 hours, I was just under 50 then, I may be closer to 30 now.  They haven’t printed out a seniority list recently.  Anyways, for the most part I run one of these.

Ignore the back wall, that looks nasty.  I run the orange crane, or one just like it.  I pick up carriers that are loaded on the other line with parts.  The crane’s are 2 ton crane’s (4000 lbs).  Here is a carrier with parts on it.

Our parts come in many sizes.  These are the longer parts, we have parts as big as these or as small as your fingertips.  Basically I pick up the carriers and dip them in certain tanks of chemicals.  Some of the tanks use massive amounts of electricity to put the coating or to color the loads.  As a matter of fact, I’ve heard we are the top user of electricity in our county.  Don’t know if it’s true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.  Some of these tanks are heated up to 200 degrees.

This pic shows a load in a tank.  This is a caustic etch tank.  It is normally black, but when loads go in, it forms a foam or gas that sits on top of the tank.  Just for fun, let’s see what would happen if you went to pick up a load and scraped the side, causing a spark.

Yeah, It burns.  And as long as the load is in the tank, it continues to put off the gas that is burning.  The only way to put it out, is to take the load out.  Which will also usually stay on fire until you get into the rinse tank.  Not that I’ve ever done that.  Shhh.  When this happened, as I was taking the picture, the plant manager walked up and asked if I was going to take it out.  I said, nah, it only has a few minutes left, I’ll wait.  He probably didn’t like that answer since he was walking some customers through.  Oh well.

This pic shows how big the tanks are.  I took this last weekend when we were cleaning tanks.  I also took it without Frank looking because he’d kick my ass if he knew I’d taken it.  I am 6’3” and I have to stretch to reach the top of the tanks.  You see the gloves and boots, those are more or less required when getting in the tanks.  I don’t usually wear them but most of the other people do.  Or people wear the yellow suits on the right.  Yeah, I don’t ever wear those either.  I prefer to just not get stuff on me.  And if I do, the burning is minimal until you get some water on it and wash it off.  Plus, as mentioned here, I wear a uniform now.  Before, my clothes all had holes in them from the chemicals.  Since I don’t pay for the uniforms, I don’t really care what I get on them.

Anyways, back to what I was saying.

This is a pic of another one our tanks.  With a little bit of my finger apparently.  Notice the steam coming from it.

Here I tried to show the steam coming off the etch tanks.  I mentioned above the tanks that are heated.  This one is at 130 degrees.  The green one above this one is one of the 200 degree tanks.  Why do I bring up the temperatures?

Here is the forecast for this week.  Starting with tomorrow, or today depending on when you read this.  Let me put it to you this way, the line I works on is very humid because of the heated tanks.  So humid that I’m guessing tomorrow while it’s 99 degrees outside, it’ll be close to 120 inside, if not hotter.  Are you starting to see why I come home exhausted after 12 hours.  It’s not even the 12 hours that does it to me, it’s the heat.  It’s very draining.  And tomorrow and next week are going to be horrible.

Why am I telling you this?  Well, when I get home after work.  I tend to veg out on the couch, which I do at other times as well.  But after work, I tend to not even want to get on my laptop.  So I may not be around as far as the blog goes.  I said may because tonight I felt that way.  But I got a second wind and shot this post out.  But I will be heading off to bed soon.  It’s after 11 here and I am probably heading to bed soon.  Got to be up again tomorrow morning a little after 6.  It’s going to come to early.  So goodbye until next time.  I’ll leave you with a photo of what everybody thinks I do at work.

That poor trash can!