Post one of two, on my life that is mildly interesting for you all


yes i finally got of my ass to post. took me almost 3 weeks though

okay first, this post is about my work in fairbanks for a week. Fisrt off, i got this job a a company called WireComm. They do contract work with electrial training and they are licenced for government jobs. my dad is just a contractor under them and he has a crew of two other guys. i was hired under him though so i brought the team to 4 people. the job we did was out of fairbanks, about 40 miles away south of North Pole on the Richerson highway. Our contract was to put in a radio building that would be the backbone connector from the army radio towers in anchorage to fairbanks. It was for this new radio system the army is installing and the fairbanks and anchorage facillites cant talk to each other with out this tower and 3 others. well, i left for the job on sunday and we drove there in the suburban so that was an 8 hour day of driving plus dinner. the next day i got up at 6 and me, my dad, mike (older man who brought his ex-wive/current girlfriend on job with us and was the lead electrication and heavy machinery tech), and Randy (a young native man who does stunts on snow machines professional and was our welder) went to breakfast, hit the fairbanks office of WireComm to pick up the building we would be putting in plus all our stuff and equipment, and then we headed to the site. i was mainly there to learn and to be the labor/bitch of the crew while my dad was the supervisior because he can actually lift anything. well, it turned out that the place we were putting this building was actually one of the four old Nike/Herc missles bases, infact it was the buncker where the nuclear warheads were kept. Anyways, we had problems from the start. originally my dad was gonna put the radio building on top of the buncker but, when he checked the depth of the dirt on top of the building he thought there was only 2 feet of dirt but when we got there and started digging (and by we i mean me of course) we foudn out it was well over 4 feet deep so we had to find a new place to put the building. we also unloaded the building and all teh equipemnt of the trucks on monday. after all that we went back into town and got dinner. i got back to the appartment around 10 after dinner. i got home, waited for everyone else to go to there roms and then rolled the couch out into a bed since we didnt have enough beds in the hotel room.

The next day was just as long. we got up again at 6, got breakfast, hit the office, gathered supplies and then headed out to the job site. This day we took the backhoe and dug up the top of the buncker until we hit cement...at 10 feet deep, so yeah my dad was way off on the depth up there. Anyways, we then sat down and looked at the area to find a new place to put the building...since there was some typ eof project going on in the buncker (we could hear fans and compressors and high electical currents going off through the vents on the top of the buncker), we couldnt place the building on the cement pad right in front of the door so we put it righ tnext to the cement pad and the door. since we knew that the buncker was being used we knew we could get power to the radio building easily. so the remained of tuesday was us sitting around tryign to redesign the radio building plans and the cat walk around the building. we headed home around 6 and got dinner on the way there. i was home around 9.

Wednesday
we did our normal morning routeen of get up, breakfast, office, job site then we started get the ground ready for the building we were putting in. first we got a think nicknamed "jumpying jack" its just a gas powered motor with a foot on it. the foot is connected to teh motor by a hydrolic arm and all the motor does is bring in and push out the arm really fast...needless to say all it does is compact the ground very nicely. after we compacted a nice resting place for the building we layed down two I beams on the ground and them put the three "feet" of the buidling on the I beams. The "feet" were these welded I beams to hold the buildings weight evenly and it was originally designed to be buried and cemected to the top of the buncker...but we couldnt do that now. so once the feet were in place with the help of a "zoom boom" (a fork lift with a hydrolic extension built onto it), randy put some tac welds in place to hold the feet to the i beams until the next day. all tac welds are are small welds used to hold something in place but is small enough to easily be cracked off if need be. after randy finished those welds off we headed home...i think i got home around 11.

Thursday
again, morning routeen. then when we got there we started placing the holding welds onto the feet and get the building ready to be placed on the feet. ther ewas a big problem though that day. first off, mike kept stalling the zoom boom when he was lifting things with it. see if you dont give it enough gas (determined by a level, very simple really) it shuts off and you need to give it extra gas if your lifting something and moving at the same time. and secondly it started to rain that day. the rain wasnt that bad except for the fact that after a while the zoom boom started stalling mroe often and then it finally stopped work. this doesnt sound to bad, but thing about what i said about when it stalled normally. when it had the 1600 pound building suspended 10 feet in the air by 2 3'x 8" steel forks. so yeah, it stalled and left our building leaning, and rocking, above our heads. my dad was pissed needless to say, we had to pull the suburban over and try to jump this zoom boom. just imagine that, a heavy peice of construction machinery connected via battery to a suburban. it was a great sight. anyways, we couldnt jump it so we left the vechiles connected for an hour and finally were able to get the zoom boom started, we then dropped the building in place and then randy went around and tac welded the building there since it was aroudn 8 oclock.

Friday
Randy started to weld the building to the I beams while me and mike put the walkway in place around the building. when randy was done with the welding he then helded me bolt the walkway onto the building and to itself while my dad and mike started getting the basic wiring of the radio room done. we then put three sides of the fence up and left the side with the door of the building un fenced since we needed the zoomboom to help us get the radio cabnit into the building. but friday was cut kinda short since we got surrounded by a thunderstorm adn we didnt want to put up thirty foot radio antennas in a thunderstorm.

saturday
mike and me finished the last wall of the fence while randy finished wiring the radio cabinate. when the fence was up we put the antennas up until randy was done wiring the building and then we put barbed wire AND razor wire up on the fence. let me tell you this now, razo wire sucks something hard. it cut the fuck out of all our hands and i was wearning thick leather gloves, randy had his welding gauntlets and mike was wearing two pairs of leather gloves. it cut through all of them with little problem. The odd part about the cuts was that they hurt like nobodies business and yet sicne they were EXTREMELY sharp the cut healed over by the end of the day. i could barely see where i had been cut but i could still feel it. after we finished with the razor wire my dad said to call it quits and we went to dinner to celebrate a good weeks work.

Okay, some points on all this. first off i got paid 36 and hour plus overtime PLUS i got a 40 dollar a day foot stipen that if i didnt use it i didnt get to keep the money. also, our day started when we got breakfast and ended when we got back to the hotel room, ie we got paid to eat AND paid to drive. Also, i had to edit this down a bit since i dont like typing so feel free to ask me about anything that seems a little empty plus if you need a drawing ill see what i can whip up in ascii. So, totally i worked for 91.5 hours that week. mind yyou wee did a three week job in only one week. My paycheck was around 4000 before taxes and 2200 after. not bad for two weeks but i kinda wish i didnt loose almost half of it. also, NOE i know i missed somethings can you remind me what i messed if anything?

OH! nifty stuff here. first off, i learned how to drive the heavy machinery. well, a basic lesson that included me digging a 6x6x6 (roughly) foot ditch and then fixing it. also, on saturday there was also some major lightning but we werent putting the poles up at that time. but what was cool was taht at the tiem we had a radio going for music and at some point the radio phased to another station, then it became a mix of the two stations, then back to the second station again then back to the original station. all over the course of an hour or so, it was cool.

anyways, enough for right now. second blog over my time since then soon.
later

nacilik
SFNL