1982/08/13
While the summer of 1981 was getting paid well at a job I hated, the summer of 1982 I was doing lots of low paying jobs some of which I liked. I got a lot of my jobs from a student placement centre which was an offshoot of the Canadian government one for unemployed regular people. I did a lot of stuff but the ones I remember most was:
- Mowing a lawn of an old lady. This started as a one off but she liked me and I mowed her lawn all summer. She made good lemonade as well.
- I worked weekends at a gas station. 8-4 on Saturday and 4-12 on Sunday. I made friends with the guy working the graveyard shift weekdays. I sometimes hung out with him during his shift.
- I worked the Buffalo Days exhibition selling tickets. Got free admission to the fair and discounts for ride coupons.
Back at the end of 1981 I got pulled from Kindersley to work on a project near Swift Current. They were cleaning the main natural gas pipeline which required them to turn off the gas. The problem was most of the towns along the pipeline used gas for furnaces and stoves and such. So it turns out that natural gas appliances can burn propane if the propane is first mixed with air. It needs to maintain a certain specific gravity which conveniently can be measured with a nice little gauge. If it goes to the left, more air is needed. If it goes to the right less. There was a little window on the gauge showing the tolerance window which needed to be maintained. The only catch, it could not (yet) be automated. It required a trained monkey to be there. And for the last 3 weeks of the summer of 1981 that was me. Since I was a salaried employee, I got my pay + overtime as it was a 12 hour shift. Also 12 hours overtime on Saturday & Sunday. I also got a paid room in a **** hotel with a restaurant (staffed with lots of hot girls) and a pool. I got the midnight to noon shift. Readings had to be taken every 15 minutes. I discovered that nobody checked up on you overnight. I could take readings at 2:55, 3:20 and 3:25 and 3:50 and 3:55 and have a 25 minute nap between readings. All I needed was an alarm clock. The result of this is I only required 3 hours of sleep in my time off. The rest of the time I could be flirting with the girls at the restaurant or in the pool. I also was allowed a short breakfast break around 7:30AM.
Well, in a town further east of Swift Current than the last one at the end of 1982 they were doing the same thing. This time there was no overtime and the hotel was ***. They had a restaurant but no pretty girls. I was also sharing the room with the guy on the other shift. I did the noon-midnight shift this time. August 13th would have been during this time.
There were several things that made this one more challenging. In 1981 the summer was warm even at night. Few people had their furnaces on. The summer of 1982 was warm in the day but had lots of cold nights. This meant there was more drain on the system. Turns out that the more the flow, the less stable the readings are. They were adjusting almost constantly. The good news -- the other guys problem aside from the one day it hit freezing overnight. He was so burned out they got me up at 8AM to start earlier.
My adventure came one fine afternoon. The air compressor died. There was a second site with a backup compressor about 20 miles west of me. Of course, I had no phone or radio so the only way to do it was to hop in the company truck and head west. I was going about 90MPH down the highway. I got there, hooked up the compressor to the truck and headed back only at 85MPH since I had a load. It was probably an hour where we had no air. It was good this was the middle of the day and it was warm at the time. I heard that there were some big flames on the grill at the local chock n puke.
It was still good money but not as much fun. They did this experiment another year with automated controls. A restaurant grill blew up and burned down the restaurant. The gas company was liable for its rebuild. I think they have a different way of doing things after that.
