Current Events > the next 3 weeks of my life are going to be really fucking miserable :(

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm doing maintenance on a coal fired power plant right now, it's something I kinda hate doing but the money is too good to pass up. I don't always work in power plants but I'll usually take one of these jobs once every year or two to help get my nest egg built up.

We've been working 6 days a week 10 hours a day for the past 5 weeks, but the engineers just found out that the main steam header for the turbine cracked in several places so we're going to have to do what's called a 'hot weld'. Basically it's a super critical weld because if it fails the whole power plant will basically shut down and possibly kill people in the process.

Because of that, we have to keep the pipe at 500 degrees the entire time it's being worked on so that the metal fuses properly. They just wrap the pipe with these huge pads that have coils in them to keep it at temperature and I'll have to constantly take readings to make sure everything is within parameters. Needless to say, working next to this pipe is going to be extremely fucking hot, the ambient air temperature is usually well over 100-120 degrees. I can weld but I opted out of doing the actual weld because I'd rather let someone with more experience on hot welds do that so I'll be doing all the grunt work for them instead which is gonna suck.

To make it all even shittier, once you start this process you can't stop. We have to start working 13-14 hour shifts so that we overlap with the day shift and as soon as we stop for the night they can jump right in. There are a total of 9 welds we have to make (the pipe diameter is around 4 feet across so it's a huge weld). They expect this to take 12-16 days and we have to work 7 days a week 13+ hours a day until it's finished. Absolutely cannot miss work unless you have a serious problem too.

I'm not being forced to do any of this, I volunteered to do it because it's going to triple my weekly income and there's a $3,000 bonus on top of that when the welds are done as long as they all pass the X-ray test. Pretty much half of the time I'll be there I'll be getting paid double time instead of the normal X1.5. I'm planning on using this money to get paid ahead on all my bills for the rest of the year so I can take the summer off so that's gonna be my incentive to keep pushing forward :)
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