It's my birthday! A lovely day. Thought I'd dust off this blog, which isn't quite as old as I am, but as blogs go, it's pretty ancient. Like a million in blog years. I think I would like to make better use of it from now on, since I have plenty of time to do so. Back in July my long career at the ole coal mine came to an end. The photos above show my firstish day- maybe it was taken my first day, maybe a few weeks in, I honestly don't recall- and my last day, standing next to the exact same truck! Camera technology changed a little bit in the intervening 27 years so I guess my iPhone has a .... slightly more fisheye effect? Or wider angle? I'm not too sure about the specifics. But I tried to capture the same angle, just didn't quite nail it.

So much has changed, even since I wrote the essay in the previous post- indeed it did come to pass, going into decline and all that. But the virus changed everything. It didn't really affect the mine closure much- that was going to happen regardless. But it sure made the "well, now what?" phase much scarier for a lot of my colleagues. Some of them got jobs, and some haven't yet. As for me, I am able to stay at home- for the first time in my married life I won't be gone from home half the time! Which is huge for us. The girls are in school, Michelle is working, and we have the flexibility to deal with any changes in that situation. Well, short of getting the virus at the same time. I have no idea what will happen then and I don't mind admitting that thought scares me. Anything else I think we can handle. 

So yeah, I have more time to pursue writing, so I will write here from time to time, though my focus now will be on getting published in other venues. I've had some small success with that over the years, even when constrained by the Harrison Bergeron effect of shift work. 

And I get to work out more- also something that I did fairly well while living with the constant near-jetlag effect of shift work. No more night shifts! That's so huge for me. I can string together a much more impressive run of workouts now. My Apple Watch is much happier with me, lol. I'll sign off with a selfie even! 

Into Decline

Here come the Berserk Dwarves! Like bowling balls with beards, this ale-swilling, axe-swinging band of marauders are no match for the resident Diplomat Elves who hitherto lived peacefully in a perfectly charming mountain realm. It’s a small world, after all, and there’s no room for dwarves and elves to live together in harmony. Before long the Berserk Dwarves had established themselves as the undisputed and rightful occupants of their new kingdom, and nobody better try to kick them out of it. Because they’re berserk! And Berserk Dwarves don’t stand aside for nothing.
Unlike regular Dwarves, Berserk Dwarves are . . . well, one might argue the difference between Berserk and Regular Dwarves is subtle, a redundancy even, a matter of blood alcohol content rather than any taxonomic differences. Be that as it may, Non-Berserk Dwarves can at least be negotiated with, lived alongside, perhaps even, in all humility, befriended. Berserk Dwarves, not so much. Once they’ve ensconced themselves in a region, well, there goes the neighbourhood.
Unless and until they go into decline…
Years ago when I first played the Days of Wonder board game Small World I was taken by the beautiful artwork and the way you could combine races and factions to get a unique combination of traits and special powers every time. Berserk Dwarves, Diplomat Elves. Bivouacking Amazons and so forth. I might have glommed onto my BersDwars a little too fondly, though, since I really didn't like the rule that said you should let your race go into decline and choose a new one once they’ve overextended themselves. Why would I want to do that? What’s better than Berserk Dwarves? Spoiler alert, pretty much anything is better than Berserk Dwarves, even Wealthy Halflings, if everyone else at the table is playing a strategic rather than a nostalgic game.
Ten years later I am a lot more savvy when it comes to board games and design decisions and the going into decline mechanism makes way more sense. It’s called Small World for a reason- there is limited space and limited tokens. If you want to win you’re going to have to manage your races and choose the right time to cut your losses and try a new strategy. Fair enough. But I still kind of wish they had just included way more Dwarf tokens.
I bring this up now not because I think Small World is the best board game ever- it shows its age for sure though it still has some fun aspects- but because I suddenly find myself in the uncomfortable position of being a real life Berserk Dwarf whose real life job unexpectedly switched from full steam ahead to Mines of Moria-style decline.
I’m a coal miner. Not the dwarvish delving-too-deep-into-the-bowels-of-the-earth-waking-up-ancient-horrors kind, nor indeed even the underground guy-with-a-canary kind, but rather I operate heavy equipment in an open pit mine in Alberta, Canada. Started as a summer student back in the 90s, then hired on permanently in 2001, though I endured a layoff for a couple of years, but now continuously since 2004. My whole adult life. I’m a miner! I’m a Berserk Dwarf!
Soon I will be a very different sort of beast, one I didn’t plan to be and have no desire to be. This sort of beast is called the Laid-off Miner. Their special power is they no longer get bonus coins or coins of any kind but at least they no longer smudge everything with coal dust. Yay!
The berserk thing about this whole situation is none of us saw it coming, really. Sure, coal mining is cyclical in nature and there are always ups and downs and good times and lean. But we were ramping up to our next phase, we were hiring anyone with a pulse seemingly, we had a plan and a future. Until we didn’t. A decision came from the big big bosses, Wealthy Humans known as the Board of Directors of the corporation I work for, that we would no longer be pursuing the next phase of mining, and that, once the current phase is mined out, say another year or so, the site would be shut down. After fifty years, our mine is going into decline.
A slow motion decline that will play out over the next year. Weird, right? It’ll take place in phases. Around Xmas time our biggest shovel, a huge electric excavator that moves massive amounts of rock, will be torn down to components and mailed to another mine owned by our parent corp. When that goes, the first major round of lay-offs occurs. Merry Xmas. I have enough seniority that I will be around to the bitter end but that is cold consolation as I wave goodbye to many of my union brothers and sisters.
In the meantime we still have to do our jobs. But, if we do our jobs too well won’t we be out of work that much sooner?  This realization does strange things to our morale and our work ethic. Going into decline has unforeseen side effects which will only be more pronounced as time marches on.
Because time will march on, like it or not, and operations will just keep downsizing and declining. Eventually, and by eventually I mean inevitably and much sooner than I’d like, the doors will be shut, and any of us still employed will be like the last of the dinosaurs, looking around after the asteroid and wondering where all the T-Rexes went. Or, perhaps more fittingly, like some kind of deep-digging gimling who didn’t notice the demon of the underworld that ate all of her kin.
What does a Berserk Dwarf do for a second career, anyway?


Note- Small World is readily available anyplace you would expect to find games, whether online or at your friendly local game store or even some big box stores. Other more modern games with similar feels but perhaps being just a little bit more fun include Ethnos and, if you really want to go all in, Heroes of Land, Air and Sea. I’ve never played Heroes of Land, Air and Sea so if you do I will be jealous but will want to hear all about it. Find me on Twitter @NathanWaddell1 and on Instagram @nwaddell1974

Finally got some photos of that incident from July. Kind of more of the aftermath after a backhoe pulled the truck out of the sump. Actually, it pulled it out and accidentally tipped it over on its side. Pics aren't the greatest but beggars can't be choosers I guess.

This story would be so much better with pictures. Then I could just say, "So, this happened:" and show you a photo and leave it at that. But I was unable to get photos of the incident in question because my camera was in my backpack, which was in a pickup truck, which was in a sump. Also in the backpack:
 -Cellphone. Normally I don't carry my phone with me at work since there's no coverage out there anyways. Not sure why I had it that night.
-iPhone. This is my Mom's old iPhone which she gave me to replace the iPod which died on me a few months ago. I just use it as an iPod, for music and podcasts, though only in my Kress truck, and the night in question I was fuelling pumps in a pickup truck and had no need for it.
-National Geographic, June issue. Fun fact, I've read every page of every issue of National Geographic since at least 2006, when my mother-in-law started buying me a membership each year for xmas. Streak ended!
-The Mastermind of Mars, half-read. Apparently it's still floating away down there.
-A Fighting Man of Mars, unread. In case I finished Mastermind.
-aforementioned Olympus digital camera. Waterproof and unharmed!
-foodstuffs of varying composition but uniform deliciousness, ruined. Though I ate the $3 protein bar after it was recovered, dagnabbit, them things are expensive!
-sundry other items of lesser value
 Anyways, the iPhone may not come back to life, though it was previously thought killed when Pallas dunked it a mug of coffee, so you never know. My cellphone is probably ruined, but good news- the SIM card was alright so I transferred it to Michelle's old phone of the same model which she no longer needs ever since I got her an iPhone 4S.
All that happened is I backed the truck down parallel to a pump to throw some fuel in it, and I stepped out to open the fuelcap on the pump when it kind of went thunk and slipped from park into reverse, whereupon it accelerated surprisingly quickly into the sump. There was no berm around the sump so it flew right in. Earlier I had noticed the transmission not going into park so I took it down to the washbay to wash out the linkage, after which it was working fine. Or seemed to be, anyways.
 So now I'm looking at my pickup truck which is sort of propped up on an angle, lights shining, over half-submerged and not accessible at all. My first thought was for my backpack. Then I realized the radio was in there and no one else knew I was down there, in the bottom of this very deep pit, with walls that are so bad they actually brought in a radar dish to monitor it, and so I would have to walk out. At midnight with no light because, though I had just asked for batteries for my headlamp not a half hour previous, I was told there are no batteries for peons such as myself. Did I mention all the grizzly bears that have been hanging around? Not that I was too worried about them, grizzlies are waaay too smart to be down in that pit by themselves at night.
What really pissed me off about the whole thing is they piss-tested me for that! On my incident report I'd written a fairly straightforward narrative of the events, highlighting facts I felt were relevant, such as that fuelling pumps is not my job. Then when I found out they wanted to drug test me, I wrote an addendum as follows, word for word inasmuch as my memory serves:
On the advice of my shop steward I am assenting to a drug test but I would like to register my extreme displeasure at the unjustness of this decision. NOT my job. NOT my fault. NOT my problem.

I wish I'd thought to write, "Furthermore, you owe me a new iPhone!" Anyways, I didn't get to be there for the funnest part, which is recovering the truck, since I was busy peeing into a cup. But I was told it was a lot of fun, and as an interesting aside, apparently my backpack floats.
There are some photos so it's possible someone will smuggle me a file or two, it's kind of funny.

NIght shift kind of kicked my ass this week. Went in early for an overtime, drove 32 rocktruck. Then the next night I was on shovel 10. The night after that, 21 loader (now with new engine). And then, pumps. Although that didn't last too long (someone stole my $200 Dunlop mudboots, and I'm kind of glad) before I was back on the loader. Finally, last night I started off life on 33 truck but quickly found myself on 14 watertruck since the dust was so bad in the pit ... I can't even think of a good metaphor. A sandstorm on Mars might be worse. Anyways, at no point did I touch my regular 43 Kress truck, though I did park 45 out of the way at some point.
I did listen to this fantastic Q podcast though, and I kept rewinding this song over and over again because it made me happy:

Here's a dirty word for you: verschmutzt. According to Google Translate, it's German for dirty. Earlier today I had no idea what it meant, and it was stressing me out a little. I worked overtime today, Sunday you know, twice the pay and all that, but I came in to run shovel which I haven't done for quite a while. They threw me on shovel 11, which is the rental shovel we got to replace shovel 8 and is identical to shovel 9. More or less. A few key differences, such as shovel 11 only comes in German for some reason. So the komputerschmitzen was telling me my somethingsomething was verschmutzt. What are you supposed to do with that? "Uh, dispatch, this is shovel 11. Can you send up a mechanic with a deverschmutzter? Yeah my luftwaffens are reading a little high on the verschmutzty scale. Ach du lieber!"
But thanks to Google Translate I know it was just telling me my air filters were dirty. Which is the coal mining equivalent of saying your battleship is wet.

After being so wordy yesterday, today I just have some photos. Here we have 35 truck, looking like it is auditioning for a part in a children's show about mining:



And just a quick shot out my window as the small snow storm we had today started to clear up and melt away.

That's more like it- back on my truck today with my regular crew. Easy day, had some minor issues with my truck so I helped the mechanic out a bit and took some pictures from inside the box, somewhere I'd never been. Trippy, see?



Also here is what you see when I pass you.

Back from another round of work. Good week- first day was a little lame since I was on shovel 9 and it was on another makework project- skim a meter off a ramp to even out a hump in the road. Which we don't use. Course the ramp wasn't drilled and it's all frost lumps anyways. Beat up the shovel and beat up the operator with that kind of nonsense. Day 2 I was back on shovel9 but it was in a better spot (somewhat anyways) for digging and plus I got to retrain a good guy who's been off for four months with cancer. Fuckin cancer.
Day 3, my truck was still down and with all the new hires and overtimers they had nowhere to put me. So they gave me a choice of hanging out with either the pump crew (my old job) or the utility crew (my old old job). I gave them option 3 and bumped a green guy off a redbox and spent the day hauling coal. Much better. Yesterday was more of the same.
but really the worst part of the whole week was driving home in the crazy blizzard. I waited till today to drive though rather than risk it last night. I've driven that highway in whiteout conditions enough to know it's doable but not very fun and to give it all due respect. The worst part, of course, was trying to get into my garage, I got stuck and had to dig myself out.
Well with all the snow there's just no choice but to hunker down and watch DVDs. You know what kicks ass? Clone Wars Season 2. Season 1 was great but season 2 is pretty much eclipsing the movies. I think Dave Filoni is borrowing a few pages from the BSG playbook, which is fine since all those shows owe a lot to Star Wars and thus the circle is complete.

Hopefully I find out tomorrow but next week at the latest if I got my truck bid or not. I'm pretty confident since my seniority is getting fairly uh, mature. But I'm gonna miss days like today!
All I had to do today was weld pipe. An extra pumpman came in on overtime (Sunday is double time for overtime guys so even though we didn't need an extra pumpman the extra pumpman decided he would come in anyways) so we let him do the rounds while me and Mike welded the pipe. Nightshift pumpman set it up for us, sort of. So the first thing we went and set it up more right, moving the lightplant which was our generator, and moving the welder into place. Looks like we'll need a chain to pull the pipe. Let's go get one! Hmm, no chains in my pumpshack. I know where there's one- only five kms away or so. Alright now we have our chain. Hey what if we move the welder over there? That would work better. We'll just need an extension cord. So we go get one. Of course there aren't any in the warehouse but we find one eventually. But now that we're looking at it, maybe the hot plate should be over here, too. Now we need another extension cord! Off we go!
Now we're set! So we grab some pipe and get it all in place. The ends are a little jagged so I grab my chainsaw to cut it better, but guess what? Chainsaw is frozen solid. It will need to sit in the service bay for a few hours to thaw out. Okay well, let's find some pipes with nicer ends and weld those while we wait. Cause we might as well do something before coffee right?
Suitable pipe is found and emplacened, only now the hydraulic control for the welder is frozen solid too. Anyways more rigmaroles ensue to get that working. And now we have welded our first join of the day, woohoo!
Hey, why is the generator kicking out? Reset the breaker there. Try it again. Again. One more time. Now it's smoking so we better not do it any more. Call the electrician!
Well, here's your problem, says the electrician. This generator only has a 20 amp fuse and your welder and hotplate are 30. Oh right. Amps. I know they make guitars loud but what they have to do with electricity has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
Anyways, what we wind up doing after exhausting a bunch of other ideas that all involve driving around the minesite is, we grab another lightplant. So now we have two lightplants to power our little pipe-welding operation, when normally a tiny little Honda generator is more than ample for the job. But whatever cause now we're good to go. Wait, god . . . dammit! I left my wrenches up at the dump where we found the lightplant! I never lost a wrench yet and I'm not gonna start now.
Anyways I think that was our final little wrinkle for the day and after that things went quite smoothly. Luckily our foreman left us alone all day because I didn't want to have to answer the question at 4:00 in the afternoon, "Nathan how's the pipe coming along?" Well, we're about ready to get started. Soonishly. We hope.

One of the many minor annoyances you learn to deal with at work is trying to get stuff from the warehouse. Although I've never thought about it in these terms before, I suppose you could make a list of rules of how to deal with warehousemen:
1. Never go to the warehouse at their coffee time as, though they will eventually help you, you will have to wade through about 50 tons of whinging and moaning first.
2. Be prepared to either kiss some ass or sling some bullshit before you get what you want.
3. They love to fuck with you.
So. I went down there at my foreman's behest to get three items. A drill bit for 25 drill, some coffee, and some creamer. I wrote the list down on my hand so I wouldn't forget. The drill bit was no problem. But coffee is on the list of banned subtsances, apparently. Along with pens. Last year or so there was a problem with coffee and pens going missing so now there are extra procedures and precautions in place to make sure no one steals them.
"Can I have some coffee and creamer?"
"No. Your foreman has to get that."
"Well, he sent me to get some. See?" I showed him my hand with the grocery list written on it. Since I forgot to get my hand notarized he wasn't impressed.
"Your foreman has to talk to my foreman."
I didn't even know they had a foreman and pretty much thought he was fucking with me. But whatever, that coffee is so disgusting I wasn't heartbroken to not get any. Anyways he loads me up with the drillbit and then he tells me to go ask his foreman for some coffee. I even get to go inside the warehouse to do this. He points to a closed door. "Just go in there," he says. I know better than that, so I knock. I can clearly hear someone talking on the phone inside so I know someone's there. I wait. Now the whole warehouse crew is watching me, which is kind of weird.
"Just walk in, we always do," they say. Mindful of rule #3 I knock again. Still no answer. Eventually I give in to peer pressure and open the door.
"I didn't answer the door for a reason," some guy who I've never seen before barks at me. He is young, probably younger than me, seated at a desk and dressed in a t-shirt and sweats. Since I am a pumpman out in the pit, I have to wear full safety paraphernalia, vest, coveralls, steel toed rubber boots (which are always wet on the inside), hardhat, and I always have a few layers of mud as extra protection.
"Uh yeah, sorry. Um, can I get some coffee?"
"No you can't get some coffee, there are procedures in place and even though I didn't write them I have to follow them. Your foreman has to come see me directly."
"Well, technically he's not supposed to leave the pit."
"Not my problem- speak to Gary about it. His policy, I just have to follow them."
He is so over the top anal about this that now I have a mission to get some coffee out of this guy or die trying. I show him my hand. "See, he sent me to get some coffee, I wrote it down right here."
Now he loses it. He jumps out of his chair and starts raving, I can't even remember all he said but he finally mentioned how it's a good thing it was month-end since, even though he was up to his ass in alligators (a favorite expression of harried foremen out at the mine, though in his spotless office I could see no evidence of alligators or even gecko lizards) he could bend the rules this one time. "You tell your foreman this is his One. Got it?"
He takes me back to a locked cabinet and grudgingly gives me two bags of coffee and way more creamer than I need.
"I'm not usually such a dick but it's month-end you know?"
"Yeah," I say. What the hell does that mean, I wonder. Long ago I learned that the absolutely best way to deal with people who have tantrums is to remain completely calm and serene. This job has made me so dirty, and scarred, and jaded, and tough even, that all I can do is laugh at this clean, soft, petty little child freaking out about some coffee.
As he stomps back to his office I can't resist. "I suppose it would be too much to ask for some pens, eh?"

I hope I never have cause to regret saying this, but I honestly think I just survived the worst week I will ever have as a pumpman. It was beyond ridiculous. It strains my meager writing skills to describe it. Like, I wish there had been a camera crew following me around so I could just show you. Maybe I can break it down, give you the merest of snapshots.
Monday: Crazy. It snowed all day. Rivers of water were pouring into CC3 (and everywhere else) and we were in danger of losing it altogether. Our only defense? My poor tired pumps that have been chugging along 24-7 these past many months. It sure would suck if one of them broke down hey? Anyways, on the bus ride home I was dozing and someone saw a bear so I instantly woke up and looked out and was amazed to see a type of bear not normally native to these parts. "Panda!" I shouted excitedly. Except it was a grizzly with two-tone fur like all the other ones we have around there. Everyone was looking at me, the world renowned bear expert, so I recovered by saying, "Doesn't she look a lot like a panda? You know, sort of? A little bit you have to admit. Ah f*ck you guys."
Tuesday: Still snowing. Yes, it is July. At 10:30 or so we lost one of the booster pumps in CC3. And the electric ones were coming ever closer to drowning. Tic toc the party never stops. They order a new pump (because there's no sense in having a spare on site right?) and it would arrive at 2:00. Of course it didn't. 4:30 at the latest. Okay maybe 6. Hey Nathan can you work overtime so we can put this pump in? Thanks. 8:30 at night it shows up. 12:30 AM I leave the minesite, in bed by 1:20. Up in time to catch the bus to work at 5:10.
Wednesday: Good thing there's a safety meeting first thing in the morning, I'm so tired it will be nice to sit still for a minute- I haven't even had time for a coffee break yet this week. Oops there's my boss pulling me out of the meeting to fix the pipe that blew apart when the electric pump failed for the umpteenth time this week. I've never seen anyone pulled out of a safety meeting before. Oh well. It was not too bad of a fix, not like the pipe that burst later that day. Hey did I mention that shovel 10 up in Prospect has been drowning all week too? Yeah, gotta get up there to fuel that pump and pull the suction line to desilt it and on and on and on. Also the haulroad is more of a haulriver, and even worse, the actual river is getting contaminated. All my problem!
Today: Might not be a bad day today! I actually have time to head down to the other end to check on some pumps that I have been assuming on faith are running all this week. But at 6:45 (my shift starts at 6:30) I get the call- "260 Nathan, we need you to grab your biggest pump and get up here, the culvert above shovel 10 has failed and it's a waterfall!" Yeah okay, I'll just throw a thousand pound pump in the back of my truck and head right up there. Who's idea was it to buy the cheap, thin-walled culvert again? Pretty sure it wasn't mine.
Well, we were still pumping out of CC3 at the end of my shift. Shovel 10 might not be alive anymore when I go back on shift, but we didn't lose anything on my watch.
Anyways, now I'm on holidays. Sandy Eggo!
Oh yeah plus I had to kill a deer on the way home. With a hatchet. That wasn't fun.

Somewhere along the way my brilliant plan went awry. Five months ago I made the choice to become the crew pumpman rather than be forced to become a shovel operator, possibly on another crew. I knew pumps could be a really shitty job at times but I also knew that it could be really really easy at other times, especially in the summer. Well here we are in summer and things just keep getting more ridiculous. Like yesterday, I was busy installing a pipeline for a deepwell pump as well as putting in an electric pump in this one pit, for which I had to scour the entire minesite for such things as nuts and bolts (I was short 5 nuts and 2 bolts so I robbed them off this one pipeline) and two 6 inch quick couplers (I robbed one off another line but never did find a second). Anyways, we made do like we always do, but in the meantime I have another pit that has a system of 7 pumps working furiously to keep the water from flooding over completely. Some of these pumps are diesel and have to be fueled by me with jerrycans since the service truck can't get into them. The sumps they are sitting in can dry out and have to be monitored pretty steadily to make sure that doesn't happen.
So, at 12:30 I shut off the interim pump back in that first pit I mentioned giving us about a half hour to move it to the new, bigger and better sump before the water starts flooding us out. Oh look, I am short of hardware! So I go to my pumpyard to grab some pieces (which ultimately I didn't have but wound up making do without) when I get a call from my buddy the hoe operator down in my other pit, he wants me to move one pump for him so he can dig me a deeper sump. Alright, since I have to go down there anyways to check it out and try to find parts. So we do that. At the same time an 8 inch pipe blows, water everywhere. Disaster! Except, that particular electric pump was down already for a blown cable and it can wait for a while. Off I go back to the other pit.
Water truck driver calls me and tells me my pump way at the other end of the minesite, about 25 kms from my current location, is down. I just laugh and say on the radio something like this: "Okay, well, what I can do is, maybe you can, um, let's see, okay I know just hold on, uh" and I just had to stop talking because really there was nothing I could say. On hot dusty days like yesterday the water trucks are pretty important. Luckily the electrician was heading that way already so I was able to get him to reset it for me. He was heading that way to go to another one of my pumps to rob some parts from a genset for this deepwell we put in. He asked me on the radio if that was okay and I said "I been rhyming and stealing all day you might as well too, welcome to the world of pumps."
Anyways I headed up to finish the job up top and it went pretty good, took a little longer than it had to but I am still new and inexperienced (and a little incompetent) so at least it got done. Maybe even time for a break right? Technically I have all these other pumps all over the site that I haven't had a chance to check but I'm union so I'm taking a gawdam coffe break right? Too bad the one pump in the other pit ran out of fuel.
It turns out the company changed their policy on forcing oilers to become operators and putting it back to how it should have been, as a bid process. So I could have stayed as the oiler. But whatever. I think I'm done with all that. We have some brand new rock trucks and I think I wouldn't mind driving one of those for a while. On those when they are missing a nut or a bolt or blow a line, they fix them right now, like magic.

Look- a two headed monster! Not really. It's actually a sasquatch in disguise. Sorta like a transformer.
Truthfully, it is a little sinister, but for reasons that involve unions and politics and stuff I don't get into here.

What kind of units would life force be measured in? And don't say midichlorians!
A while ago a bunch of us were at work shooting the breeze, and we were talking about a new mechanic on our crew who was amazing at his job, though his enthusiasm for the job was steadily diminishing each week as he got more used to some of the work conditions that were his new norm.
"Yeah you can see the life force draining out of him a little more each day", I said. Everyone laughed but one guy, who is a good friend of mine but he has a bit of a history of resolving conflict with edged weapons, he says, "Yeah I love watching the life force drain out of a guy!" at which point we all stopped laughing and exchanged nervous glances instead.
Anyways so Robin figures me taking his pumpman bid is a surefire way for me to lose some life force. After the first day, I told him I felt so good that I thought I had gained a unit of life force.
This past week, well, it's hard to say if I'm ahead on life force units or bleeding them out profusely. All I had to do was get a pump system back in the bottom of this one pit that we are quickly going to need. This job was such high priority that they brought a guy in on overtime to help me the first day, and they pulled mechanics off of the #1 shovel to fix a pump. Wow, never seen that before, right?
Long story short, there is still no pump in that pit, even after four days of working on it steady.
Where to begin? The old infrastructure for the pump had been robbed blind over the winter, so I had to weld new pipe to put in, except the generator for my pipe welder had been robbed to power the lights of a backhoe. And there was no unfrozen pipe to weld anyways.
There are tons of other little details, such as there was no sense in installing anything until after we blasted a pattern directly above the sump the pump was going in, which wasn't scheduled till day 3 of my 4 day shift. So on day 3, comes time to blast, and the drill that had drilled the pattern is about to move out when it pukes up a main motor. So that takes most of the day arranging for two bulldozers to come and drag it out and so on and on.
Even yesterday, we were ready to forklift all the stuff we needed down to the sump, but the blast had covered the road and a backhoe was sent in to open it up again. Which he did no problem, except at the very end he lost a track and blocked the whole entrance.
But I did what I could and now I'm on four days off, so my units of life force is pretty much through the roof right now.

I remember this one time in grade 7 when my music teacher had to tie me to my chair to get me to sit still. I wasn't one of those kids you would call hyperactive or ADD or whatever, but when I get bored, I get a little antsy. Flashforward 30+ years and that's one of the reasons I bid off the shovel crew. I just can't sit in those machines for 12 hours without going a little crazy. Actually, 12 hours is not too bad, but four days in a row of 12 hour shifts is a little much. Even then I can do it now and then and it's not so bad- I'm an adult and I can deal. But forever and ever amen of 12 hour shifts? No thank you very much. Being the shovel oiler was ideal for me since my job mostly involved labour outside. But they keep trying to "promote" me to fulltime operator. So I bid on the pump crew, a position my friend Robin graciously left vacant to pursue a tradesman ticket.
The pros of being a pumpman:
In the summer when things are going good, you mostly just drive around and make sure things stay that way.
The cons of being a pumpman:
In the winter things usually aren't good and you mostly go around beating on pipe with a sledgehammer.
In the spring things are never good and you mostly drive around frantically putting out fires. Except when I say fires I actually mean the opposite, waterstorms of uncanny malevolent gushiness.
Oh well, on the plus side no more running shovel!

I loaded my first truck this morning at 7, and then they were down for the weather so I didn't see my second truck till 2 in the afternoon! Gave me some time to read and take some pictures and video.
I sure wish I could take my Nikon to work with the new lens (without wrecking it with coaldust) , then these pictures would really pop:

We need you to take care of pumps today.
Okay
Later: Can we have an operator at shovel 6 to test out the propel motor?
Okay
Later: Can you run the blaster's truck to the other end to switch out the deck with the other one?
Okay
Not much later: There's a flat tire on that truck, go to the tent and change it out.
Okay
Not much later: Turn that truck around- they lost power at 25 drill so we'll go get the cable reeler.
Okay
And later: We need you to come to the dry to fill out the incident report from that pickup truck hitting your reeler.
Okay
Later: Can we have that operator back at shovel 6?
Okay
And later: Hey Nathan can you go check the pump in Prospect?
Okay
At the end of the night: How did it go out there tonight?
Okay

It's like a puzzle! Except I had to cheat a little.

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.