To the moon and back

G'day.

Yet another busy week this week, and several more to come by the looks of things.
First few days of this week were spent mostly around town for a change, catching up on all the outstanding work I haven't been able to get back to for the last goodness knows how long.

I also spent a fair bit of the week working on my new second hand work vehicle, wiring it up and preparing it so that it will be mine usable. I have probably made the wiring somewhat more complicated than it needed to be, but however, it will be worth it in the end. I spent a fair few hours on it last week, and two days on it this weekend, and I reckon at least another day to get it finished.

Thursday and Friday were spent at Callide putting up a new tower. I have attempted to stitch a few photographs together to give a 360 degree viewpoint, not sure how well it will turn out online but I have attached it regardless. The first day we stood the thing up and rigged the top few antennas, and then the second day we finished rigging the rest of the aerials and doing some testing.

Not much else to report really, I haven't got enough drive to write much more, as it is past my bedtime and I should probably turn in for the evening.

Not long till I'm back in NZ now!

TTFN

Wild Horses

G'day.

Well, now I know what it feels like to be Bugs Bunny. Not to say that I've been eating carrots all week and getting chased by a bald midget with a shotgun. More the burrowing around under the ground bit.

Again, I suppose I best start at the start. Which for the purposes of this update, shall be Monday morning. Regular readers may recall last week I ended up working saturday, so after my one day weekend Monday morning arrived all too quickly. Anyhow, another early start, as I was booked for an induction at Callide. Pronounced "Cal-eyed" not "Cal-eedy" as I heard someone attempt to say it the other day.

So, up at the crack of dawn yet again, and in the truck for an hour and a half. Arrived at site and went through the mostly wasted day which is an induction. Luckily most of the paperwork was similar to Dawson, so as the instructor lady was yapping on I managed to get 3 hours of paperwork done over the course of the morning, so that in the afternoon when she asked us to go and do our paperwork I just handed it to her to be marked there and then.
She gave me one of those "what the hell" looks and proceeded to mark it off, and then let me go. Which was excellent, as it saved me three hours of even more wasted time. When finally got out of the induction I checked my phone and found a message from uncle Grant saying he had just left Callide that morning and was heading to Moura, and was I going to be there...

Typical of my luck, he probably drove within 10 meters of my truck and yet we managed to miss each other yet again, even though we were on the same mine all morning. That's the way it seems to go around here lately.

Turns out that I wasn't allowed on site directly after my induction anyhow, because I hadn't yet had the drug test completed. This was because I was booked to do it last saturday, but of course ended up at cracow instead, so had to miss the drug screen. Job for next week, perhaps...

Anyhow, Tuesday was somewhat unusual, as somehow I managed to actually spend most of the day in Gladstone. Starting work at 8 for a change was strange, by body clock woke me up at 5:00 as it has been used to for ages. I caught up on some paperwork, managed to get some software setup on my computer, and generally had a productive day. I ended up swapping a fan unit out on a cellsite, but luckily the site was in Gladstone, so everything was working out for once. I finally got out of work about 6 o clock, and went home to prepare for the rest of the week out at Cracow again, this time to perform routine maintenance on their above ground comms system.

So, come Wednesday, I was back on the road again in typical Willie Nelson style, heading back to Cracow. Three and a half hours later, I arrived on site. I signed in, and did the usual breath alcohol test, which for some reason I don't seem to ever fail, and was led to the training room to do a site induction. Yes, I know, two in a week. Anyhow, this one was somewhat more to the point, and 10 minutes later I was handed a cap lamp and an emergency breathing device and pointed in the direction of the electrical supervisor. Somewhat confused at this point, as I didn't see why I would need a cap lamp for above ground comms maintenance, I did as I was told and met the electrical supervisor. He then introduced me to his daughter, who was the electrical leading hand that day, and said "here you go, she will take you down and show you the problems we are having". Coming to the conclusion that it didn't look like I was here to fix surface comms, I donned my lamp and we drove over to the portal. "Do you get claustrophobic?" she asked me. "I don't know." I replied, "but I imagine we are about to find out!"

Turns out it wasn't as bad as I imagined, certainly an eye opening experience however. Although I didn't tell them this, I had no previous experience with underground comms whatsoever, and yet here I was sent to repair them. After a bit of a tour around, I slowly pieced together how the system operated, and started to troubleshoot it. Long story short, across the three days I found a couple of issues and managed to repair them, overall giving the impression that I knew what I was doing. A bit of luck really, as I was certainly... in the dark. Boom boom chish.

I probably shouldn't joke, given that on the drive home I was informed about the Pike River explosion. Although that was coal, and I was in a hard rock mine, having just come out from that scene makes you appreciate a whole lot more what those guys must be having to endure.

Overall, a very interesting experience, I guess not everyone can claim to have been over 800 vertical meters below the earth's surface. The air down there is thick, and very humid, and incredibly warm. My test set was reporting 51 degrees C, but that would have been slightly higher than ambient temperature. It was probably closer to 45 I think. Right at the bottom where they are hauling from there is very little airflow to help move the hot air around. After spending 4 or 5 hours underground, it's quite interesting coming up to the surface again, everything seems so light and open. The aircon in our truck failed right at the bottom, so we had a very warm and slow trip back up, as the windscreen kept fogging up. I was glad to get to fresh air after that particular trip.

I probably wasn't supposed to have my phone on me down there, but I sneaked a couple of quick snaps, of course being very low light they haven't turned out all that flash but it might give you some idea of what it's like.

Anyhow, finally back and it's the weekend, so one can't really complain. Except I didn't set my alarm this morning and ended up sleeping in too late and missed the opening hours of all the shops I wanted to visit today. However, could be worse.

Right, better go and do something productive for a change... It may just about be rabbit season again.

TTFN

Walk of life

G'day.

I had just started typing this and my bedside lamp decided to make an interesting buzzing noise and fizzle, and I discovered my air con unit was leaking a large amount of water directly into the lamp. Luckily, I have managed to isolate said lamp and I am going to have to address the problem of the leaking air con tomorrow. Probably par for the course, given the rest of the week. I suspect I should start at a suitable point... lets make it the beginning.

Monday. Typical mine week monday, up at a reasonably early hour, and off to Moura. Not too bad as far as work load went, nothing too strenuous, and all going quite well. Until I got back to the camp and went to connect my phone to my temporary work laptop for my internet, that is. (Because my original work laptop was away for warranty repairs). I discovered this alternative work laptop had no bluetooth to talk to my phone. At this point remembering that was why I had packed my personal laptop, I cranked that up just to find that no matter what I did, I couldn't get telstra to let me authenticate on their network. Long story short, (and believe me, I didn't give up easily...) I gave up and resorted to just using my phone as it was.

Usually I would have been able to use the cable connection, but recently when the "hold" switch fell off my phone, I took it apart to fix it. Good news was the hold switch now works fine, bad news was that for some reason now the USB cable doesn't.

That aside, Tuesday and Wednesday were fairly by the book, if such a thing exists. A couple of good jobs on draglines, one to replace a camera which was no longer functioning. The camera lens was apparently on order, and had been for some time, so I decided I may as well try to chase it up.
Basically, there is an old type and a new type camera and lens. The mine now runs the new type cameras, so we of course require the new type lens. The stores person who obviously meant well but didn't have a clue what they were doing had decided that because we were replacing the old stock code with a new one, it must of meant that we couldn't get the old ones any more. He then researched it, found another supplier for the old lenses, and cancelled the order for the new ones, without realising that we desperately required the new type. Yet another long story short, I now have the new lenses on order... I hope.

Thursday was interesting, another incredibly long story short, there is a dragline which they have been rebuilding, and mucking us around with, and rebuilding some more, and making some colossal mistakes, etc, which they were trying to put back to work. Aside from the fact it kept breaking, they discovered that the radio antennas were in the wrong place, and desperatly required them to be moved before the thing goes back to work. They were planning on doing it the following wednesday, and tried to organise as much as possible to get it done by then. That was all well and good, until they turned around and said "oh by the way, we are now doing it tomorrow". Well, I had other scheduled work, and my supervisor at the mine told them that I wasn't going to be helping them. But in not quite so many words.

They somehow managed to guilt trip another Nixon guy who was working at the washplant to come down and help instead, which suited me just fine anyhow, as they wanted the antennas at the top of the mast. Which isn't a fun task... Believe me on that one.

Well, Friday... he showed up at half 6 as they requested, just to be informed that the dragline had broken down yet again over night and they were going to be an hour or two before they could get to it. So he proceeded to make up some antenna cables etc, and I left them to it and carried on with my first scheduled job, which was to replace some batteries at a repeater site that were faulty.

This was the second attempt at performing this task. These batteries are 2 volt cells, so of course you require 6 of them to get your required 12 volts. When the intelligent electrical planners ordered replacements, they ordered... one cell. That aside, apparently now all 6 cells had arrived, so I managed to get an apprentice leckie and a ute with a hiab on the back and away we went to locate these batteries.

On the way, we got sent to have a quick look at a dozer that apparently was having troubles with his radio. We drove all the way down there, across some really rough rocks, just to call him up on the radio and find that it had come right and he wasn't going to stop for us just to check it out. So, turned around, cursing at the wasted time, and swung past the dragline on the way back to see how the other bloke was getting on. He was having about as much luck as I was, they had decided that the dragline wasn't going to move for a few more hours so had decided to try and do the antennas where it was. Except, the dragline was parked on a ramp. Which is on a slope. So the crane driver got down there, and immediately told them they were idiots and he couldn't possibly set his crane up on a slope to lift 100 meters in the air. In not quite so many words.

The intelligent planners then decided they would get a dozer to flatten a pad out on the ramp to allow the crane to set up, but it turned out this was going to take 3 hours, and they thought that they would have the dragline moving again in a few hours, so they ended up just waiting to fix the dragline instead. We left him to it, and carried on to locate our batteries. Finding the first one was easy, this was the single cell. We went pulled up near to it, hopped out, and found we had a flat tire. Those sharp rocks at the dozer had done an excellent job of slicing through the rubber tire and letting all the air escape. I suppose at least it was only flat on the bottom.

As the truck didn't have a spare (the spares had only arrived that very morning and hadn't yet got into town to pick one up) but luckily, as we had broken down in the stores, they happened to have a stock of them. We put witches hats around the scene, filled out the necessary safety analysis documents *cough* and attempted to crack the wheel nuts. Except, I couldn't. For love nor money. Thinking smarter, I spied a length of pipe lying near by, and proceeded to introduce it to the wheelbrace. It seemed to be moving, and I was right. The pipe had done an excellent job of turning the wheel brace into a banana. The wheel nut was still stubbornly fixed where it had been. Giving up on the pathetic wheel brace, I ducked into the tool store and "borrowed" a 2" drive socket and short bar, and with the help of the length of pipe, finally managed to loosen the wheel nuts. These things were that tight I can't believe that we didn't bust a wheel stud getting them off.

Finally got the tire changed, and the battery loaded up. It transpired that the remaining 5 cells were further down the road, so we got the keys to the laydown area where they were stored and drove on down. We hooked the hiab up to the crate of batteries, and... discovered that the crane couldn't lift it. So, an hour later, we had managed to split the box open and crane the cells on one by one.

At this point it was lunch time, so we decided to call back into the workshop for a bite to eat before heading up to the site. Went to go into the workshop, and saw a lot of guys standing around doing nothing. Not that this is unusual for australians, but they all seemed focused on one thing. Which turned out to be a 1.5 meter brown snake which had decided to make a home underneath a tool chest inside the workshop. This ruddy great snake decided he didn't like the company and slithered out under the door. They tried to pick him up with a snake hook, but only got his tail and he kept on "high-tailing" it out the door and slithered under the workshop. Which is pretty much where he stayed, they ended up giving up waiting for him to come out and made do with some "beware of the snake" signs instead.

So, after a bite to eat, (us, not the snake), we headed on up to the hill. One by one we removed the old batteries, and installed the new. Couldn't work out why nothing was working properly, and then discovered that I had inadvertently managed to leave a negative off the battery bank. However, no harm done, I hooked her up and away we went. I was planning on going home around 2 o clock, as this was when my 8 hours was up, but by the time we got back to the workshop it was pushing half four.

Foolishly, I decided to go back down to the dragline to see how my colleague was progressing before heading back to Gladstone. They had only just at that moment started their job, the dragline had taken more hours than they thought to get repaired and moving, and then it took them an hour to set up the crane, and they had just got it into the air to run the cables. I was having a yarn to the crane spotter and deciding what I was going to do to help, when my phone rang.

It was the boss from Gladstone. The conversation went something like this:
"How's your day going?
"Could be better... I was supposed to be out of here at two, and now I'm still here, down a pit looking at a flaming dragline."
"That's alright, it could be worse."
"Oh yes? How so?"
"Did you have anything planned for the weekend..."?
"I'm not sure if I should answer that... carry on?"
"I might have a small urgent job for you out at Cracow..."
"Oh great..."

He went on to inform me that a dozy grader driver had managed to hook his grader up in the guy wires to a 100 foot tower, and tore the whole thing to the ground like a house of cards. The "urgent" status was because on that tower was the towns TV channels, the police comms, and several other subscribers communications, all whom were of course now off air. As I was already at Moura, I was only about an hour away from Cracow.

I figured I had nothing really to lose, and informed my workmate that I wouldn't be able to help him with his dragline after all. I jumped in the truck and headed off to cracow, with very limited materials given the task at hand. I finally arrived in Cracow around 6:30. I was instructed to give a certain fellow a call once I reached the town. I drove into what the sign said was Cracow, and saw a pub, and nothing else. I drove back and forwards, couldn't find a town as such, so I parked outside the pub and rang him anyway. He asked "where are you?" I replied "outside the pub". He said "well I am on the front veranda of the pub, come on over". So I did. He informed me that this was the town, all of it. A very nice pub actually, very country feel to it, and the pommy barmaids weren't bad either... good thing I'm goind back at the end of this week too.

Anyhow, this fellow introduced me to yet another fellow, who took me up to the tower so I could get a look at what I was going to be dealing with the following day. As my old boss used to say, "a picture is worth a thousand words" so I'll attach a few at the bottom of this. I took some drawings and about an hour or two later we left the site, and I signed into the camp for the night. I did ended up talking to the poms until closing time at the pub however...

The next morning, I arose at 5 and headed up to the site. It looked even more of a mess in daylight than it had the night before. I proceeded to map out exactly what gear was there, and what was running off what. Once I had identified everything, we attempted to straighten out what we could. We ended up with two semi usable sections, so we cut the bent ends off and welded the two sections together to give us a basic form of tower. Half the antennas were complete write offs, and the others were very bent. I straightened out what I could, and remounted them to our makeshift tower, doing my best to point them in roughly the right directions. When an antenna is shaped like a banana this can be easier said than done.

I had to re run every cable run, as the heliax cable that originally was on the tower was completely bent and useless. Luckily I had a couple of drums of coax in the truck, as I used every bit, right to the last meter. Once the tower was more or less rigged, we got a telehandler up there and stood the tower up against the side of the hut. We tied on some of the old guy wires, and tied them off to waratahs hammered into the (very) rocky ground. It's a temporary measure, but at least it got the television back on air, and kept the towns people happy.

Once that was all done, we did some more testing, and decided that was the best we could do. Two TV channels were solid, the other two were slightly fuzzy, but given the type of cable used and fact there was half the antenna gain, this made sense. I threw my tools back into the truck and headed off to start the 3.5 hour drive back to Gladstone. The people of Cracow were really friendly, I felt quite at home there. This might have been because I was the only thing that could get their TV going again, or they might just generally be happy to see visitors, I'm not sure.
13.5 hour day on a saturday... Wasn't what I had planned on, but hey, I came here to work, so why not.

Anyhow, it's off to Callide mine tomorrow for a day in the classroom doing another mine induction... what fun. So, it is well past my bedtime, I should be asleep long ago. Hopefully this week goes somewhat smoother... A day at Callide, hopefully a day in town, then three days back at Cracow. No rest for the wicked, so they say.

TTFN.

Black Dog

G'day.


Yet another fun filled week, some interesting moments in it. Not entirely sure where to start, so I'll try the beginning.

Monday was pretty uneventful, which was good, it gave me a chance to unpack from the previous mine stint and get back into the Gladstone way of operation. Tuesday I ended up helping the installer with a taxi... taxis are the same the world over I have discovered, impossible to please. We put all the metering, taxi signs, cameras, and everything in, so it is a mammoth task as you may well imagine.

Wednesday I had a bit of a lollipop job, a mine not too far away had a failed repeater which I had to go and swap out. It took longer to travel there and back than it did onsite actually doing the job. I like those nice straight forward ones now and again.

Thursday was when it all started to get more interesting... The catalyst which started my main problem I believe is my new computer. You see, on the previous evening I was playing counter strike online and decided to remove my wallet from my back pocket, where I was sitting on it. I placed it next to my keyboard with the intention of not forgetting it. That was well and good, and I continued to be slayed by my online counterparts, until I finally decided to go to bed. Next morning, I of course arose and loaded my pockets with the usual junk I carry around, but of course my wallet was not on my bedside dresser where it usually lives, it was still camouflaged on my computer desk.

You can probably see where this is leading, but of course I ended up at work without my wallet. Now, this would not normally be a major problem. One would usually be able to carry out their daily tasks and it would not affect production whatsoever.

However, of course, being my luck, today was the day which I had booked in to go and apply for a marine security card. So come 9 o clock, I went trundling down to the marine office with the appropriate paperwork. We went through most of it, and then came to the point where she requested my multiple forms of ID. Feeling smug at this point, as I had remembered to put my passport in my pocket, I retrieved it and she ticked it off. She then asked for my drivers license as a supporting ID document, and, fully prepared to hand it over, I reached into my pocket. Which of course was empty.

After a brief period of minor panic at realising my wallet was not there, my mind immediately recalled where I had left it. A second or two passed, where the cogs in my head were frantically spinning, trying to think of a way around the problem, when it hit me that I was indeed sunk. There was no getting around this one. I sheepishly confessed to the lady that it appeared I had misplaced my wallet, and the corresponding license which she was requiring. She immediately froze over, and became icily cold. (I suspect she thought I was a terrorist trying to break into the secure marine environment and had forgotten my forged documents.) She informed me that she "was incredibly busy today" and I would have to rebook at a later date. Which turns out it will be 2 weeks in the future.

So, I left, kicking myself for such a simple mistake which on a normal day would have 0 repercussions, but today had me totally snookered. As it transpired, I was also booked in to obtain some safety glasses too, which I also required my wallet for, so I ended up going home and retrieving it.

The day continued to get better and better. I had a job about an hour and a half south, so I jumped in the car and took off. Made it to the site, it was pouring down with rain. This was supposed to be another easy as job, swapping some batteries out and plugging in a power supply. How difficult could it be. Firstly when I opened the door a huntsman ran at me from the left, and a giant lizard from the right. It took me a few seconds to identify the lesser of the two evils and I ducked towards the lizard. Huntsmen are really really fast, and this one was doing his best to beat his high school sprint record. He shot behind the rack where I was about to begin work and hid. The lizard meanwhile shot out of the door and took off. Regaining my composure, I began working on the rack, expecting Mr Huntsman to reappear at any moment. I eventually spotted his legs around the back of the rack, so I figured as long as I could see his legs I was pretty safe. I don't believe they would usually bite, but I wasn't intending to find out.

Anyhow, after putting all this new gear in, I fired up the existing on site UPS and discovered it was completely shot. So I jerry rigged the system to run without the UPS and took down it's name and number in my notebook in a manner consistent to that of any good police academy.

So, I proceeded to jump back into the car, and drove back down the road towards Gladstone. It was pouring down, cats, dogs, small elephants, you name it. I was driving along, thinking about the fault, and how to best solve it, and eventually started to think the road was a little different to how I remembered. Dismissing it as just my imagination, I continued on. 25 minutes later, I reached a T intersection leading to Bunderburg. Which is the opposite direction to Gladstone. Realising I had missed the turnoff, I turned around and retraced the 30 KM which I had overshot the turnoff by. How I missed it I have no idea, there is a large restaurant and a huge sign pointing down the road... I must have been completely immersed in thinking about the fault and not concentrating on directions. I remember when I left the site and started driving I thought "next major landmark is the next town", but I had of course forgotten about the turn off. So my autopilot kept going, expecting to see a town. So that added 60 KM to my trip for not much gain really.

Friday was marginally better, for a start. The original plan for the following week was I was going to be going to Callide mine on monday for an induction, and then putting a tower up at Callide later that week. That was sweet as. Then, it was changed late Thursday night, that I was going to Callide for the induction on Monday, and then going to Clermont to put up a tower there instead. (That's about 500 KM away). So, I was all prepared for that plan. Then the guy from Callide rung me up asking if I had a current drug screen, which I had not. And I was miles away, doing a vodafone fault, so I had no chance to come into town to get it done on the Friday. So the induction at Callide was postponed, and I was going direct to Clermont. Ok, no worries. Carried on with the task at hand, finally got back to work about 4:30, and the supervisor tells me that the plans have been changed yet again, and I now am going to Moura all next week.

Turns out the guy we had lined up to do the Moura work did the induction and one week training, and then threw in the towel and got a job with another crowd out there instead, and gave us 2 days notice. IE, the weekend. So if I ever meet him I might have a word or two to say to him.

That's the way it goes over here at the moment, you never know where you might end up at a moments notice. On the bright side, it looks like I might end up with this guys vehicle, on the down side, it appears to be falling to bits. Anyhow, waste not want not.

Righto, I think I've rambled enough for one sitting, I better go and prepare for... the unexpected.

TTFN.