I’ve been pissed off for two days straight, though I’m feeling much better now.
On Monday, we are told we’re getting a special tanker in Tuesday at 2:30 pm. It would leave the London plant at noon, and arrive between 2 and 2:30. I have to test this tanker, there’s no getting around it. When a tanker arrives, I have to sample the tanker itself, and get a sample from the Aging tank that the beer goes into from the tanker. I can get the tanker sample as soon as it arrives, but I have to wait an hour until the Aging tank is full to sample it.
This would mean I would need ot test this tanker at 2:30, and the Aging tank at 3:30 pm.
Since I’m supposed to get off work at 3, my boss tells me to come in at 8 am instead of 7 am so that I’ll still get paid for working until 4.
So I come in at 8 and work all day. *work work work* It was a fairly craptacular day.
2:30 pm comes and goes, and there’s no word on the tanker. At 2:45 my boss happened to be on the phone with someone from the London lab, and they mentioned that they just got their tanker sample a half hour earlier, meaning that as of 2:15 pm the tanker had not yet left London!!!
It takes a bare minimum of 2 hours for a tanker truck to get from London to Toronto, so this means I’m stuck at work until at least 5:30 (tanker arrives at 4:15, I wait an hour to get my second sample, and I plate it and clean up)
Ok, that’s not so bad. I’d only be getting paid until 4, but that’s life, right?
No, life gets even better at that point.
The tanker doesn’t even arrive until 5:20 pm. I don’t know what the hell they were doing in London, but it appears to be “screwing me over”.
Meanwhile, all this time I’m waiting I have nothing to do. I’ve already said I can’t work ahead in my job. I really can’t. I can’t sample beer that hasn’t even been brewed yet. I haven’t quite gotten this “time travel” thing to work yet.
So I’m sitting around bored out of my skull.
The tanker arrives at 5:20. I go to sample it, but I have to wait about 10 minutes for the tanker guys to be done hooking up their hoses.
I get my sample and go back to my lab and plate it. Then I sit around for the rest of the hour, and go to get my Aging tank sample.
Only to find one of the tanker guys using my petcock (get that image out of your head, it’s like a faucet used to get a sterile sample). He’s testing the DO (dissolved oxygen), which us Microbio people don’t give a rat’s ass about. He tells me he’ll be done in about 15 minutes.
So I don’t even get my sample until 6:40 pm, and a run back to my lad and rush around plating it.
I finally leave work at 7 pm. Gee, I’m ever so glad I came in late, it means I only worked 11 hours instead of 12. Of course, I only get paid for 8 of ’em since I’m salaried and not hourly.
I’ve had a stress headache for hours, and I get home so late and pissed off all I have time to do is shower and eat and act pissy before collapsing into bed so I don’t die at 5:30 am when my alarm goes of.
To be continued….