monkeyplus1

Last night was the first night of WTF?!, a new monthly event at the Fez ballroom downtown, organized by an old friend. Actually, a lot of friends where there. The event is host to noise, experimental, and supposedly, electronic music at some point. The only thing that was played last night was noise.

Solenoid’s set was cool, though it never quite came to life, the rest were minor irritations. Some were just creepy, and not in a cool way. Maybe next month will be better.

fuck. I just had a moment. I haven’t had a moment like that in a fat minute.

no reason for it, really.  unfounded disappointment, frustration. gone as fast as it came.

good thing, too. I love the world, and all the people in it, I swearz.
just forgot for a minute.

xoxo

I’ve been out of sorts all week. Fighting burnout at work, while at the same time, getting a tremendous amount of work done. And, I’ve been sure to give myself time to unwind and relax before picking up the kids from school.

On Tuesday, we went to skate the half-pipe my neighbor built in his back yard. Although I wish I was learning this twenty years ago, that’s not going to stop me from trying now. That soreness is just catching up to me today, two days later. I’m slowly getting used to where my center of gravity goes when the skateboard starts up each side of the ramp.

Yet somehow, for all the things going well, except for a disagreement with the wife, the three pounds of dogfood in my skull seem a bit scrambled, unfocused. It would be easy to blame this on my recent conversations with my secret oracle, trying to understand its jibber-jabber, but it has been supremely interesting food for thought.

Yesterday, I got a tour of the facility where I’m currently consulting. Before that, the only thing I’d seen was the parking lot and the dismal office where we software developers inhabit a cube farm.

It was cool stuff to see, though we white-collar softy computAr haxors certainly got some less-than-friendly stares from the blue-collar, manly man types working in the foundry.

Before going out there, we were briefed on what the company does (cast precision parts out of hi-tech steel alloys), what the company makes, what other countries they have facilities, plants, and foundries in. Here in Portland, they specialize in parts, mostly replaceable shovel “teeth” used by mammoth mining equipment in the east coast, where they rip up the ground to obtain coal.

The manager telling us all this also does all the hiring for the blue-collar jobs. He mentions that most are fresh out of high-school, and while previous experience is not likely or required, that they have to be some strong tough guys. He looks us over real quick, and I can see what he’s thinking. There’s three Indian guys in our group, one of which is so scrawny toothpick-thin that makes my 155-pound self look obese, and a short Jewish lady in her 50s.  The scrawny Indian dude keeps rudely interrupting the manager, and I don’t know how he (a) didn’t get mad, or (b) understand what the fuck the Indian guy was saying through his heavy accent.

After donning the requisite hard-hats and goggles, we were given a set of wireless headsets that would both protect our ears from loud noises, and allow us to hear the narration by the manager giving us the tour.

Our first stop was a furnace and giant ladle, where they use collosal amounts of electricity to melt the steel before pouring it into casts. This area was about three stories high, very hot, and extremely dirty. Keep in mind, this foundry has been in near-continuous operation for almost 100 years. We got there just in time to watch them lift the lid on this giant crockpot from hell, and pour some bright, molten steel out. Sparks flying everywhere, and waves of heat. We stood back at least 50 feet, and the heat was still intense. All the guys working down there wear shiny heat-resistant suits.

A shit storm of dirty brown smoke rushes up out of this furnace. It’s mostly sucked up into some kind of vent. The manager says this smoke is “pelletized” and re-used in the furnace.

At this point, the taste in my mouth is like having inhaled a few boxes of vaporized match-stick heads. Can’t be good for you.  The Jewish lady asks if the Department of Environmental Quality ever stops by. Oh yes! says the manager, and most of the time we do pretty good, he says.

We continue on to where a bunch of beefy dudes are filling boxes with sand. Well, it’s not just ordinary sand, it’s a mix of stuff from around the world, and apparently very expensive. They try to recycle as much sand as they can, but they have their own private dump. Some of the sand they get is from Florida, where the sand is slightly radioactive. Hmm.

There’s nasty smells in the air, some chemical that they use to change the consistency of the sand, so that it can hold the shapes that are pressed into it. The dudes at this station fill containers with the sand, slam them onto a machine that vibrates the sand first, and then presses it down with tremendous force. The finished product is almost like pottery, except that with a bit of effort, you can crumble it back into sand.

These sand molds will hold the molten steel until it cools off, after which the sand can be brushed off to reveal a newly cast hunk of steel, shaped to fill some obscure purpose.

We see several other methods for using sand. In one building, there is a machine about the size of a large truck, that is a vacuum. To demonstrate, the manager removes his hard hat and sticks it on the end of a suction tube, where it sticks, impossible to pull off with human strength.  In this room, they have enormous boxes they fill with yet another kind of sand. Using plastic-wrap, they are able to use the suction to compress the sand into molds. The manager says this is only one of two foundries in the USA that use this method.

We go into yet ANOTHER room where they use sand to make molds for steel casting, except the parts they cast in this room are solid steel segments as big as a car. There is one such part cooling off as we walk by, that is around 30 feet long, and is part of some excavating device. Also in this room are “drag chains”, use for pulling shovels across the ground in strip-mining. Each link in one of these chains is the size of my body, except it weighs a lot more.

In yet another sand-room, they use some kind of gas to solidify sand for small book-sized molds. The guy says the name of the gas is far too long of a chemical to remember. It smells BAD, toxic, and yet two workers are sitting at this machine, diligently shaping one mold of sand after another.

We move on into other rooms, where we see some of the cast parts being “flogged” (beaten with hammers to remove the tails left in the casting), ground, welded, and polished.

One cool stop in the tour is the Rapid Prototyping area. The design engineers will send a CAD file to this room, where a machine like a 3-D printer makes a scaled, plastic version of what the engineer is working on. The guys in the lab have a display shelf of some of the things they’ve made in their printer, including a little HMMWV (the Army’s High Mobilility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle, known to civilians as a “Humvee”). Cool.

We move onto another building where there is a powerful x-ray buried four stories underground. They use the x-ray to examine the crystalline pattern of atoms in the steel. There is another machine that somehow uses a lot of electricity to reveal microscopic defects. Here, some guys are working on a “cutter head”.  This looks like a funky drill-head, meant to bore a hole through solid rock big enough to drive a bus through. No shit.

After all this, my morale was improved, and feeling thankful for the education that’s kept me from having to work those jobs, but also with a new-found respect for those dirty, grungy men, who look down their nose at me walking by in my clean, business-casual attire, doing no more physical labor than punching code into a computer.

I know they would HATE my line of work as much as I’d hate theirs, but it’s kind of strange how the line between brain and brawn is so black and white.