It has been an interesting week, this one. Monday was supposed to be a fairly straight forward day, a nice "easy" job for the local port, or so I thought. Of course, one can never take anything as gospel, and when I showed up it became rapidly apparent that the task at hand may not quite be as simple as first thought. Long story shortened somewhat, I ended up having to return to work to fabricate a bracket and some mounts for the antennas, and locate a cabinet in which to house the equipment. That took most of the morning, and by the time we returned with the gear it was well past lunch time. As I had made sure to measure thrice and weld once, luckily the bracket lined up perfectly and from that point the job went fairly smoothly.
Tuesday started out relatively straight forward too, I went and completed the port job which we had started on Monday. Everything went as it should, which is very unusual for the jobs I usually undertake. However, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I finished off there and ended up spending the rest of the day aligning some super urgent repeaters which we needed to get out to a job the next day. That took somewhat longer than anticipated, and I didn't end up leaving work until about 10:00 that night.
Wednesday I had a job out at Moura to have a look at a few things for the local coal seam gas company. It was a bit unknown the exact details of what I was going to be doing, as they had several smaller jobs all rolled into one day. I packed as much miscellaneous equipment as I could, and headed out. The job started with some repairs, luckily these were pretty straight forward, mostly broken aerials and that sort of thing. I tackled another couple of jobs, and then decided to get into the main job of the day. This was to get some phone lines connected in an office block which was a good 40 odd meters away from the location of the PABX. I had been told that there was no copper run to the office, so I had come prepared to cable the entire way. Before getting stuck in with laying the cable, I decided to check out the existing panels and see where I could run my cable to. This is when I discovered that there was a panel in there labelled "phones to front office". Feeling an instant ray of hope, but not wanting to jinx the matter, I investigated further and discovered in the front office there was a panel labelled "phones to PABX". Hardly believing I could be this lucky, I tested the lines, and found they were dead. Thinking that it was all over, and I would have to run my cable anyhow, I unscrewed the panel to see where I could terminate my cable. Then I noticed that the cable pairs going to the rear of the panel were on different pins than the ones that this particular phone system required. The old ray of hope started shining again, and I performed some mirco surgery to the panel at both ends. I plugged it all in, and lo and behold, it worked.
I started to become very suspicious at this point, because things never go easily when I look at them, if there is a worst case scenario, you can bet that will be it. But not this time...
Seeing as I then had plenty of extra time up my sleeve, I ended up fixing a telemetry setup for them too, and then eventually hit the road back to Gladstone, a strangely successful mission for once...
Thursday, I headed out to another mine to run some new antenna feeders. We were going to have to use rope access to get to the roof, as the bucket truck wasn't going to reach, and it was going to be a bit of a pig to do. So, I took all the necessary equipment, got on site (and after the obligatory half hour of paperwork) we fired up the bucket truck and discovered that we could get it to within a meter of where we required to work. This made the job incredibly easy, and knocked a good couple of hours off the job time. Aside from the redbacks in the roof, we had no major dramas.
I ended up getting out of there well on time for once, which again, is very unusual...
Friday, I expected the worst. After a week of luck, surely it couldn't last. I hadn't got stuck. The truck hadn't broken down. I had all the parts I needed, the jobs were all successful... it was all too good to be true. Friday's job was a doddle. Or so I had been told. And to add to the day, work was putting on a BBQ at 3:00. All I was supposed to do is drive up to Rocky, show their guys how to put up a telo mast, and drive back again, well in time for the BBQ. Simple. Straightforward. Can't possibly go wrong. Right. Wrong.
I should have known better. I had become complacent. I should have known, "easy" jobs are NEVER EASY. I arose early, and drove up to Rocky. Just before you get to the Rocky office there is a rail crossing tied into an intersection. There just happened to be road works where I wanted to go, and it was down to a single lane with stop/slow men. (Yes, they are exactly like stop/go men, only different). I pulled up to the intersection, and gave way, as there were a steady stream of cars going past. At this point in time, I discovered two very important things. The first thing was, this rail road crossing did not have bells. The second thing was, the "give way" line is past the swing arc of the barrier arm. As I heard the distant "honk" of a large diesel locomotive, I also noticed the barrier arm on the opposite side coming down. I thought "that's unusual, I haven't seen this side coming down yet". There was good reason for that. The fact my roof isn't transparent just about explained it. I realised the imminent danger right at the last second, and only just managed to hurriedly reverse as the barrier cleared my retreating bullbar by only millimetres.
That close call over, I then had to wait 25 minutes before I could get moving again. The train that went through was very long and slow, and after that the stop/slow men let huge rush-hour-train-delayed queues through without thought to let poor old me in to the flow of traffic.
When I finally arrived to the Rocky branch, I needn't have worried about being late. Long story short we spent the best part of 2 and a half hours trying to work out exactly what the job entailed, as the person in charge had decided to take a "personal day" off work. Super convenient. After finally sorting out what the plan of attack was, we finally made it to the actual work site and began work. The job should have been straight forward, but we kept striking little setbacks. For example we had a fellow relatively new to radio comms do the connectors for us on the main feeders. We showed him how to do one, and he terminated 5 or 6 of these cables before we realised the plugs were the wrong gender. We searched the box of bits, and that was all we had. They had been ordered incorrectly. We sent one guy back to get some more correct connectors, and carried on with the rest of the job. A couple of hours in, a lady and half an office came running out and started yelling at us. We went down and asked what all the fuss was about, and it appeared they had lost all their internet and telephones and of course were blaming us. It didn't matter that we were on top of a completely different building, and we hadn't even drilled into the roof cavity yet, but apparently it must still be our fault. We humoured her and went for a look around, and then asked if she had an IT bloke there. In a big display of triumph, she marched us to the IT bloke who then proceeded to explain to her that it was a server issue and nothing to do with us whatsoever. Somewhat deflated, she let us get back to work.
After that, we had several other minor hiccups, but eventually got the job done. Unfortunately by this time it was about half past 5, and I was long overdue for the BBQ. Rush hour traffic in Rocky is mental, and by the time I hit the road back to Gladstone is was beginning to get dark. I finally arrived back at work, after spending 12 hours doing what was supposed to be the easiest job of the week... and the BBQ was long over. I knew my luck couldn't last.
Anyhow, I have a week back out at Moura next week, which should go pretty well. I'll be sure to let you know if it doesn't...
TTFN
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