Scumbag Muffins

A while back, the Scumbags were working 24/7 on a machine. This doesn’t normally happen, unless one is getting pulled apart for repair – a shutdown. Usually an engineering company gets pulled in to run the repairs and it goes full stick for about a month, maybe more. You get to know the people from the other companies because you’re all there day after day, night after night.

I was on night shift supervision the entire time. Four nights on, one off. As it happened, one night I was working away on a particularly tough job, right in front of the engineering foreman’s office. It’s never a place you want to have to work, because that area also houses the site safety supervisor and all other sorts of demons. This particular night, though, the engineering foreman wandered over near me, fiddled about with a tool and some air lines for a while and then came right over.

He’d hooked up something to make my job ten times easier. It was an air chisel – a cylindrical vibrating barrel that he told me with a grin not to get too excited about.

I handed it back at the end of the shift and thanked him. You owe me one he said, with a grin.

Shit. That was a priority job that I never would have finished before morning if it wasn’t for that tool. I think this means I’ll have to get in the kitchen. By the time I get home from this site I’ll get four hours sleep, get up and bake and come back to work. It has to be something quick and easy. Muffins!!.

It was a winner. I pulled the Scumbag crew up for a break around 11pm and the engineering foreman came over to tell me he’d already had four breaks just to have a muffin. They became a hit where I brought in trays (actually cooked by my flatmate instead) for pretty much the entire work site to get into.

Since then I’ve laid pretty low on the muffins. Last week, though, I decided to bake a whole bunch in my new sexy kitchen. I was up at three in the morning and baked enough for pretty much every worker in my company to get one. Plus a few left over to butter up the foremen at the site I’m working on currently.

Later that morning I clocked on at the work site and scuttled off to fill my travel mug with the first coffee of the day. While sipping away, I walked past the safety supervisor’s office. He’s a lovely, generous, loud guy who happens to be able to see a lot of the indoor activity from his office. Vic! he yells out. You shouldn’t need a coffee this early! You haven’t even started yet! I pulled up a section of his doorway and explained the muffin project. Turns out he fancies himself a bit of a cook, and has spent more on his kitchen than it cost to build the house. We challenged each other to a bake-off. Specifically muffins.

Two days later, doing the same travel mug filling run, he spotted me. The corridors are a hive of activity at that time of morning. There’s blokes everywhere getting work orders and paperwork signed, getting coffee and getting ready for a day in the field. Mr. Safety Man yells out to me through all this:

Oy VIC! When are we going to have our Muff-Off?