What sort of image does that immediately bring to mind? A backpack vacuum with miles of orange power cord following behind like a lifeline? A trolley with half a dozen different spay bottles filled with various colours of merrily swinging off the side as I push it along? Me lazily pushing one of those scissor brooms with the fluffy shag pile rug pads on them across a big polished floor?
Well, none of the above.
I clean machines in coal mines. Here's a little one.
It's a drill. One of the easiest jobs in the list of things I've done so far in this work. What the hell does a drill do anyway? Here's one at work.
They make the holes for the blasting I posted pictures of recently. They track along, leaving little anthills where they've been and big shafts in the ground in a big pattern. An explosives truck comes along filling each shaft with fertiliser and at some point they blow the entire lot sky high. It's a dodgey quality snapshot, I know, but to the left a little and up you can just make out the trucks following this one around filling up the holes.
So where do the cleaners come into all this? Usually about 2am we set up a truck with high pressure water cleaning guns on it and two workers spend the next six hours blasting all the mud, coal dust, oil and grease out of existence with hot water and pulsing rotary nozzles. We climb all over the thing trying to work our way through a mess of hoses that are set solid in mud, clearing all the crap as we go and usually wearing a fair portion of it all in the process. Even though we wear two disposable chemical suits over the top of each other the water from the blasting will inevitably soak through them leaving us saturated.
Pressure guns are great for me. I get frustrated easily with grot that won't budge, so it's particularly satisfying to stand there with a few thousand pounds of pressure in my hands, take aim and fire, while thinking DIE FUCKER!!!
The work is grotty, the pay is crap, and the bosses are idiots. But hell am I seeing some things I would never have dreamed!
7 comments:
I WANT ONE OF THOSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And that is a fucking awesome job description, Vic! No wonder the pay is crap; most people I know would actually pay good money to do it.
Imagine the my drill is bigger than your drill fun you could have with one of those!
Believe me, there's bigger machines to be blogged about yet.
yay for vic back on line...missed you madly...been in bed allweek with much painhave a massive infection on my back molar poisoning my body am waiting to get it pulled out tomorrow..ugghhhhh! when do we get to see miss vic>?
and yes once again using alannahs email to log in
You goon Kel (aka your youngest daughter - good on ya!). I miss you and love you heaps!
xoxox Vic
I haven't seen one of those drills, have seen the final blast though... looks fricken awsome. Looks like a nice amount of black coal there too =)
"A trolley with half a dozen different spay bottles filled with various colours" - You know that atleast one is filled with gin >_> heh.
"Believe me, there's bigger machines to be blogged about yet." - Maby a digger? As the big dumpies are 'small' ^_^
Boz.
Hey Boz! If we could get away with gin on site it would be awesome, but not likely when they do random testing.
As for bigger machines, I'll post about them soon.
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