The other day at work my fellow oiler turned to me and asked, "What do we do out here anyways?"
"Mostly it feels like I hold a bag out and they pour money into it."
But actually we had a pretty busy week. In fact that fellow oiler, Charlie, was actually leadhand, meaning he is the acting junior foreman and basically the busiest guy on the minesite, and me his right-hand guy. Trucks were getting flat tires, pit walls were crumbling down, there was blasting every day, the maintenance crew was in a state of near rebellion, the night crew was screwing us over and the (acting) senior foreman was looking more and more frazzled as the week went on- he starts to stutter, forgets peoples' names and develops an eye twitch- I feel kind of bad for him since he is a junior foreman on another crew and not really suited for the senior position. But all in all, a regular week.
This time of year is hard on the pickup trucks- it snows and then melts and makes an awful muddy mess, and the trucks get mud and water everywhere and their alternators short out and all kinds of things. One just quit when I was slowing down for a yield sign, so there it sat. Charlie kept having issues with trucks and their wipers. One would just start spraying washer fluid on the windshield randomly and keep spraying till the well was dry. At least he had clean windows! But no horsepower, so he switched out for another one that had only one working wiper. The faulty wiper was on the passenger side, so I couldn't see where we were going. I told Charlie he better not crash into any haultrucks since I wouldn't know until it was too late. I had to go operate a shovel for an hour and when Charlie picked me up again he proudly informed me he had fixed the wiper. So of course he had to demonstrate and it worked for two whole cycles before the blade sproinged off and the arm went crazy and got caught in the other, previously good wiper and wrecked that one too.
I think that's when he asked me what we do out here anyways.