Coming Out/In

Today I came out as trans to some of the guys I've worked with for years and grown to think of as good friends. It was far harder than coming out to my workshop counterparts - I haven't known them or loved them for long at all and therefore can take or leave whether they like me or care at all. The guys today, though... I've known them for longer and don't want to lose them.

Typically I put myself through hell before telling them. I was nervous as hell. I was trying to escape my own ultimatum to do it today, before I take my second shot, before I go too far into my changes to be being polite about it and more like treating them as an afterthought. But... it's one thing to think Well if they can't handle it they're obviously not friends and completely another to face the thought of losing them as friends but still having to face them at work.

Also typically, it appears I put myself through hell for nothing. Everyone was great - no stars and banners, no shock, no turning away. Just a calm response of Whatever makes you happy. You're still Vic. I love this industry. What a great bunch of guys.

Safety Plus

An emergency stop button on a drilling machine...

Sun Non-Sense

Some days you have to take your cues from Lawrence of Arabia...

Tickled

Yesterday I worked with just one bloke all day. We got paired up to do menial shit. It's boring as hell, but it's menial shit that has to be done none the less. My method is to just hook in and make it go away as quick as possible.

Today will be the same story, because we're not finished that pile of work yet.

The problem is not the work. It's the guy I'm with to do it.

See, normally I can work pretty well with people I don't like. Sometimes the case is that I don't like their personality but they're a hell of a worker. Sometimes it's the opposite - they can't organise their work at all but it's compensated by the fact that the conversation has you smiling all day. I try to find some aspect that is at least tolerable about them, if not truly likeable.

But this guy... Well, he's just tickled me with the dislike feather all over. Depressed conversation that is constant, not much knowledge of the work even though he says constantly how good he is at it, thick as a fucking plank, and top it all off he's plainly trying to assert his alpha maleness over me. Bahaha.

Boring. Fucking. Idiot.

Today I will snap the dislike feather into pieces.

Darwin at Work

Stacker: A remotely operated conglomeration of metal structure and conveyors, mounted on rails. Controlled from a central location, the stacker moves without warning to pour out coal into different stockpiles as it is recieved by train at the dump station. As the ships arrive, the coal is reclaimed by another machine and moved by a series of conveyors over the road to the ship loader.




Plover: Candidate for natural selection.

One of my favourite once-a-week blogs is Mining Mayhem, a site showcasing pictures things which the industry collectively refers to as incidents. You slip and fall, it is an incident. You use a heights harness in a stupid way and get busted by somebody who knows what they are doing (one of the dickheads I had to look after did), it's an incident. A bulldozer falls off a highwall (seen it), it's an incident. An explosive shot misfires (been there, seen it, scared pants off me) sending rocks hurling a hundred metres in the air and a couple of hundred metres beyond their marked intended exclusion zone, it's an incident that pretty much gets treated like a crime scene.

This is probably a multiple of incidents all rolled into one big, comical video.



I could watch it over and over. Brilliant.

A Meme! Holy YAY!

A while a go Maria posted a mammoth meme that had to come out in a couple of parts. Now, I'm going to bust it up even further. Thirty questions? I haven't got the stamina to answer thirty questions
in one sitting? No way can I sqeeze out anywhere near that in one sitting, especially when for some answers I seem to be prone to a form of literary elephantosis.

So here we go. Maybe five a sitting? I'd say five a day, but that would mean giving up the snooze button time religiously. I can't commit to that with any certainty since the cold snap of the last week.

1) ONE OF YOUR SCARS. HOW DID YOU GET IT?

I have a scar on my head. It's this lumpy raised line that will never (as far as I know) go down. It feels funny when I scratch at it, which is often. The story...

I'd been seconded to do a quick pressure job for my absolute favourite of all superintendents, a gruff loud man by the name of Mick. He would grab you, march you to several points that he wanted cleaned up (that all look identical) and fuck off and leave you to it before you could even ask a question. If you cleaned the wrong area you got yelled at. He was a fantastic man who kept you on your toes by the minute.

Anyway, I found myself cleaning a few places in greasy crawlspaces on a time limit. Because there was nobody but me left after he dictated the job and fucked off, I took the rare liberty of taking my hardhat off while I crawled in and worked. I finished, crawled back out, and stood up too early - before the incline of the roof was actually high enough to stand up under. Consequently, I stood up under a set of grease injectors which have adjustment tabs and buried about a centimetre of one into my head.

Fuck that hurt I thought. Dickhead. I touched my head to feel if there was a bump and instead there was blood. Fuck. Fuckitty FUCK. First thing, I went for the bag of rags I'd been dragging around with me and plucked one out. I pressed it onto that patch on my head and then had a look. It came back red. Not just a little. A big, big patch of red.

It's okay I thought. Head wounds bleed far more than others. I'll go get a second opinion.

With that thought I made my move toward the exit out of the belly of the huge machine I was in, off to search for my supervisor at the time, and also my best mate. Cath'll look after it. She'll tell me I'm a dickhead and it's all fine. Head wounds just bleed a hell of alot, that's all..

So I'm on my way out around this big circular area, and who turns up? You guessed it. Mick. Fuck. He'll blow his brain at me. There he is, coming into my area of work, yelling out for me at the top of his lungs to see if the job is done. I leave the blood soaked rag on my head and whack my helmet over it to cover up the evidence. He checks my work, I breathe a releived thanks, Mick and hightail it the fuck out of there to find Cath.

Cath is having lunch in our work truck. I peel off my helmet and rag combination and tell her to look. She's a mother and a horserider. She's been there for all sorts of injuries. She pries my skull and pokes a bit before she turns to one of the other guys and says it's bad. Go get Mick. Oh, shame.

After that it was decided that I should go to the mine First Aid room. These guys rarely have any fun. They have to be there on call all day and all night, have all the training in the world, but really not much actually goes wrong. So when a case like mine comes in they pull out all the stops. I arrived with a rag on my head and walked out with a full under the chin and a few hundred times around bandage. They have remembered my face for the last few years (primarily, I think) because I made them take photos on my phone for me of just how ridiculous their over the top bandaging effort actually was. We laughed a lot despite the situation.

Next came the trip to Singleton hospital to get stitches. It's a reasonably large town, surrounded by industry and mining, with coal and money spewing out of every orifice. Yet this hospital reminds me of the one that was near the tiny little town I grew up in. It was small and pretty backward. The nurse unwrapped my ridiculously bandaged head. She poked around. She remarked that it would need stitches and disappeared for a while. When she came ambling back through the door she was holding a bit of paper, not the stainless steel bowl of accessories that I expected. There was no doctor following her. Oh, that's right. The doctor had already gone home for the day.

The piece of paper she gave me was a map to the nearest doctor's surgery. In there I spent a further several hours waiting (now in the company of my unpleasant boss) before a doctor pried open my already well clotted and dried wound. He put a stitch in and left me to it. The unpleasant boss stood by while I paid for the whole procedure.

Singleton Hospital? I mean, thank fuck a piece of machinery didn't fall on me. Thank fuck my hand wasn't severed. Who knows what the idea there would be? Here's a map to the nearest metal shop. They'll cut it off in the press for you.

2...

No way. I've written enough for today. That'll do.

Early Morning Wash Job

For work yesterday the Roster Gods granted me the pleasure of having to do a 4am Excavator wash. It's been ages since I've been rostered on to do one of those – I tend to get stuck elsewhere doing other things and miss out on all the fun.

And it is fun.

Alright, you get shit all over you. It's freezing at this time of year and you're pressure blasting with water – which means that you will be standing outside in a long sleeved shirt with two jackets over the top, two bright white sperm suits over that, both of their little white hoods up over your beanie adorned head and a hardhat on top. Looking like a slow moving marshmallow. And you will still be freezing. After three hours solid of pressure blasting, you will also be saturated even through all those layers.

But...

You're using a gun with 4000psi behind it. They're easy to hold when you're used to them, but there's still a kick that will send a beginner backwards. You get up there in the dark and carve away at the grease and mud covering this huge machine and work your way toward the dawn.

I had chunks of mud an inch thick and the size of a man's shoe blasting off the top of this machine in the path of my water gun. All around me there was destruction caused by me, and only me. Oh, therapy. It was brilliant. After the destruction and debris is blasted off the side and into the dark the machine emerges as clean, shiny, and - of course – overwhelmingly orange.

Somewhere near the end of all this comes the other bonus of the shift... Dawn. I love seeing the sky change shade by shade as I'm working. It comes as a surprise every time. I look up from my destructive path for a second and realise There's a tinge of blue to go with those stars now and it makes me smile. It carries with it this indescribable burst of energy and wonderment mixed together. It's exciting. It gives me this wonderful feeling of awe at the way the world works.

It also means I can see any bits I've missed before we hand the machine back to the service crew.

It's crap, it's dirty, it's freezing, and it has the remarkable property of reminding me that it's great to be alive.

To My Co-Workers:

On Morning Time

It's early. I have twenty minutes in which to drink a cup of tea, put my shoes on, panic about the whereabouts of my keys and cigarettes and then I'll still be at work before I'm meant to.

Jonah the Mostly Black Cat is rustling away beside me tearing up the latest box that has pissed him off. The fridge is humming away to itself, the pay TV box has joined in with it's own somewhat possessed hum and yet still, above all the household running sounds I can hear the crickets carrying on outside.

This time of morning is pretty relaxing when I'm not rushing to find clothes, shake off a hangover or just beat the consequences of too many hits on the snooze button. There's stuff all traffic out and about. All the drunken idiots that tend to walk by have either got into a fight and been hospitalised or arrested or they've passed out somewhere by now. It's just me and the crickets.

It's times like now - kicking back, relaxing before the start of the hectic day - that I try to resolve that I will get up well before I'm required to every day. I know somehow that it's not going to happen. Things will get in the way. Jonah will destroy my bedroom all night leaving me with the five minute gaps the snooze button affords me to catch up. I'll get hit by the drunk stick before bed, rendering any form of organisation completely useless. I'll forget to put the washing on early enough and have to fight my way through the stress of ironing still wet clothes while saying shitgoddamnhell just dry. I'll decide to make muffins for sixty people at the drop of a hat.

There will usually be something to keep me from kicking back relaxing in the mornings.

But.... I really do love this time.

Go Fish

Scumbagland yielded a whole lot of hours of boring waiting around today.

It had rained, typically, for the entire Christmas break, making the mine we were going to impassable. At least until the dozers had knocked a few layers off the existing roads to expose a bit of dry dirt. What does that mean? Five hours of waiting around with people you don't know much about.

I've been in this situation before, you see. Plenty. One amazing guy broke the awkward silences by bringing in riddles for us all to do. I've played music games. We've all spent hours playing target practice with the plentiful stones. I have a collection of fossil leaves and other interesting stones from trawling around where the truck has been parked for hours.

And I also have a pack of cards.

That's where that interesting cross-section of people becomes far more of a hinderance. We're constrained to what everybody knows how to play. The lowest common denominator. Sometimes you can jag some really good card players and set up a tournament of sorts... Other days, like today, it's junior style cards in the form of Go Fish!

There's something campfire-ish about tucking a bag of rags under your butt and dealing out the cards while you're sitting out there in the nothing of a mine. People open up to slagging each other off a bit, letting out their sometimes guarded senses of humour, relaxing a bit around people they normally don't talk to. Face it, it's better than ignoring each other and trying to sleep on a wonky bench seat in the back of a truck [ie sauna]. Sometimes a decent person will emerge through the chance to be sociable.

Go Fish stumped me today. That's a pretty basic card game. Should we hold Scumbag interviews with a mandatory gaming skills test?

Should I be campaigning for a card game rules book to be part of the daily equipment?

Dear Scumbag Boss Peoples,

I am writing in order to place a request for a copy of certain card game rule books to be placed in the glove boxes of all working vehicles (and possibly those that aren't, for later). We lower Scumbags feel that it is in the best interest of crew dynamics and sociability that group activities such as the participation in card gaming are an asset to crew dynamics and staff satisfaction. This, in turn, leads to a greater sense of camaraderie amongst employees and therefore a more positive approach to the safety of others within the crew.

Yours Sincerely,
The Scumbags in Scumbagland.

Can we have some staff training days too?

Scumbag Phraseology

There are a few main phrases to be aware of as a Scumbag.

That’s What She Said - This can be used at any time as an interjection to a conversation. A show-stopping statement.

Vic (talking about a grease buildup) : Holy shit it’s hard.
Anonymous Scumbag: Yeah, that’s what she said.

I Fucked Me Back Ay - Often accompanied with hobbling actions, this is based on a worker who did not last very long at all in Scumbag Industries. A Dead Set Unit, who spent a night shift playing on some over-exaggerated injuries. Basically the guy got the site safety officer at the time involved and sent my stress levels through the roof in a few short seconds. The other guys picked up on this phrase and started using it to make me laugh about the entire episode.

From there it became a way of breaking the silence. The guy has long since been shuffled off, and I’m not sure whether half the workers really know the origin of the phrase. It’s just something we say to break the tension now.

Wanna hat? - [Why? ‘Cause you’re a cock]. There are lens cleaner wipes out where we Scumbags go, that are in little individual packets with the brand Uvex upon them. Somewhere along the lines a bored imagination took hold of this and ran, twisting them into a brand of condom. Usually the phrase Wanna hat? is accompanied with the action of reaching into the top pocket to fish one of these out and attempting to hand it to the person receiving the comment. Why? ‘Cause you’re a cock is most often implied in the statement and not needed to be said. Unless the person is a Dead Set Unit.

Watch this fuckin’ idiot - One from the self-proclaimed King Scumbag, this must be stated with rising volume and pitch. Out of respect one of his phrases has been appropriated into general usage. Originally to warn of an approaching idiot driver, the usage has broadened to include general workplace hazards as well.

What have you done for me lately? - This is what happens when a bunch of Scumbags get together socially. Out comes Eddie Murphy doing stand-up comedy with Raw, and we all have a new phrase to play with. This one is so new it’s guaranteed to almost make me wet myself laughing, or at least reduce me to tears.

Scumbag Lingo

It’s about time I introduced the world to some of the Scumbag lingo. We have our own way of speaking, derived by spending far too many hours together in sometimes extreme, other times extremely boring, and most often isolated conditions.

Scumbag - One who has earned the title through being a good worker and good person. This title is not just bestowed upon any old person who rocks up for a shift. You can depend upon a scumbag, you can have a laugh and you will look after each other no matter what.

Deadset, or, for more emphasis, Dead Set - Serious, absolutely true. For example: Dead Set, I fell over a rock with every bastard watching me. Another example can be displayed in the following conversation:
Vic: Deadset mate, he’s a fuckin’ idiot.
Anonymous Scumbag: Deadset?
Vic: Dead Set.

Translation:
Vic: Seriously, he’s an idiot.
Anonymous Scumbag: You’re serious?
Vic: Absolutely.

Unit - A worker who is most definitely not a Scumbag. This may apply for a small period of time, in humour, to a Scumbag who has done something idiotic. This may be phrased Dead Set you’re a fuckin’ unit, mate. A deadset unit.

Most often the term unit is used to describe those with little to no aptitude. They could be dumb, oblivious, dangerous or just downright lazy.

Festy Cheese Beanie - The worst of the worst. This term applies only to the opposition. It literally translates to “foreskin” and this translation has been described in great detail within earshot of the offending crew members, without their knowledge that this is actually how we refer to them. The Festy Cheese Beanies are inferior workers, with inferior knowledge and equipment. They have amazing amount of distaste bestowed upon them by the Scumbags.

Mad - Excellent, amazing, deadset awesome. Example: I found this Mad new way do the job.

Goggle Box - The fluttering of the eyelids upon a woman’s clitoris. This is a hypothetical sexual manoeuvre invented on a boring day, laughing at this term inscripted on a wash pad storage box. ”Check out her eyelashes! Vic, I bet she could give you a mad goggle box!”

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?

Quote of the Day

...goes to Scumbag worker The Mole.

”It’s more useful than a cucumber in a women’s prison.”

Busted!

A text message from one of my bosses:

It is unaceptable to smoke in the trucks you should now better

Well, that's just teasing isn't it? Smoking in the truck is punishable by termination of employment. Knowing that I was treading a fine line of getting away with it or being jobless, I was forced to hold back on my reply...

Your spelling is unacceptable. You should know better.

Hit, or Not Hit

Do you already know the latest stats joke?
Probably...

Three statisticians go hunting. When they see a rabbit, the first one shoots, missing it on the left. The second one shoots and misses it on the right.
The third one shouts: "We've hit it!"

Okay. So there's a bit of a point to all this. I was at Scumbag Headquarters (aka The Yard) the other day, wasting time as is the norm when you're on shift in The Yard. The resident old fart mechanic turned turned around at one point not realising I was behind him. He made a point of saying sorry to me.

What for? says Vic.

Well, I almost touched your breast when I swung around there.

Oh. I don't see my tits as a sexual thing at all. There annoying lumps of fat I'd rather do without. The guys just don't seem to be able to comprehend that though. So I come back with:

You know what the difference between almost touching a breast and being a fucking mile away is, don't you?

No? He says.

And to that I replied: Absolutely none. Whether you're a mile away or an inch away you still haven't touched, so who gives a fuck?

The Scumbags find Pebbles

Pebbles?
No, not of the small stone variety.
Of the large, decaying variety.

For some reason one of our scumbag teams was sent out to pressure clean a machine part - the crowd rack, or "sticks", which is the bit that the bucket is attached to - on Pebbles. We spent an hour sitting around waiting at the workshop for directions because nobody was sure where the hell it actually was. Finally, somebody who had been around for a while recalled where Pebbles was stashed. As it turned out she was over in a nicely deserted and overgrown back corner of the mine.



See? There's her name right up there above the driver's cab.

Three scumbags, a beautiful day, and a bunch of stuff that had been dumped. How much better can it get?



Exactly as the writing on the track frame says. What now?

There's another old shovel sitting around at a mine we go to. A while back I asked around about it. What's it sitting around there for? Parts? Scrap? Turns out the thing has been there for years and isn't able to be butchered for parts. To scrap it will cost too much. So... it just sits there gathering rust and mud. I guess eventually it'll become part of a hill.

At least Pebbles gets to watch the grass grow where she lies.

Getting Around With The Scumbags

Working for Scumbag Industries has some perks. We might have to be leaving the workshop at 4:30am to get to our prospective work sites, but once you get there you can end up having a pretty cruisey day.

Take this day, for example.

We arrived at 6:30am and snoozed at the gate of the mine for about an hour waiting for the guys on site to say it was okay to approach the machine. Then we get there and lo and behold... the thing still isn't ready. So you either snooze, talk shit, or take photos of the whole process.

Here we have a 4WD taking on a shovel (the shovel is that big sucker on the left).



And here we have a guy wondering how the hell he's meant to turn this thing off. Can't see him? Just on the left of the bucket there.



Half a pack of cigarettes later and we're finally allowed to go to work. Some of the guys you'll have to prod awake and watch them sleepily get ready. But hey, we're all getting paid for it. It's stuff like this that makes work worth going to.

PhotoHunt: Protect(ion)

PPE:- Personal Protective Equipment



Here's Shooter, one of my workmates. He's exhibiting the typical PPE we're required to wear for the job. Hardhat, safety glasses, lace-up steel-capped boots, and because we tend to work with grease and chemicals, a disposable "sperm suit". Or, as Shooter likes to call them instead, an Oompaloompa suit.

Seems a bit over the top. Mostly. Until two days ago, that is, when I caught myself a beauty at a moment without the hardhat on. Consequently I buried an adjustment screw on a grease injector block more than a centimetre into the top of my head. A hell of a lot of incident reports, reviews and a suture later, I'm beginning to like the idea of having a chin strap to keep the thing permanently on my head.