Monday, November 14, 2011

Most useless shower ever

Well, Saturday night I took a much needed shower before dinner, ate dinner briefly, went to go watch a movie (Life of Brian), and before the show started had to respond to a fire alarm down in the Main Power Plant (MPP). So, that shower was good for about 45 minutes. There was no fire, but there was plenty of glycol vapor being sprayed out into the work area. We had to use SCBA-clad firefighters to set up ventilator fans to eject the vapor from the area, so it would be safe for mechanics to do the necessary repairs, as well as clean-up folks to deal with all the glycol on the floor, etc. After dealing with all that I had to check the science projects and the cryogenics facility to make sure they were functioning properly. It made for a short 3 hours of sleep before a busy Sunday, which included the first time I had gotten to do the hands-on work for transferring liquid helium from a large storage container (dewar, to be precise) to a small one for transport over to the Dark Sector Lab for the BICEP2 telescope.

This morning we got to deal with a false fire alarm in the galley, which was fun/brief. Somebody got a few too many cooking fumes going, and a lot of folks got a 5:30 AM wake-up call. I was in the gym, so didn't have to drag myself from sleep to respond.
I wanted to live the life, a different life. I didn't want to go to the same place every day and see the same people and do the same job. I wanted interesting challenges.
~Harrison Ford

2 comments:

Becky said...

Do you get an extra shower if you've been exposed to icky stuff?

EthanG said...

That's probably allowed, but I didn't get in the dense vapor.

Your package arrived, and is impressive as usual. Thanks so much!