If many of us in industry (I’m talking about guys like me that make the wheels turn) approached our business with the same skill and moral conviction that the big wheels in the big boardrooms of GM and Chrysler and the banks and the insurance giants, this country would be sitting in the dark, ...

I wish I could say that everyone with whom I associate on the job is terribly motivated and competent. Some are. Our local IT (information technology, you know, computers and sh*t) is motivated and capable and a joy to work with. He enjoys his work and has a sense of humor. My work laptop has ‘...

Had to run down into deep Cajun country south of Kaplan, Louisiana this morning to have a little talk with the guys at the station. We just found out that the good folks who supplied an electrically-operated overhead crane had erred in not providing one rated for use in the areas inside the building...

After two weeks of kicking back in the classroom, today was my first day back at the normal routine. I’ve caught up with email. Had two meetings, first the normal Monday morning staff meeting, and immediately following that, a meeting to decide how best to site our critical electrical spare pa...

In the little world in which I used to work, it was not uncommon to know the majority of the other players up and down the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana.  There were at most a hundred or so senior technicians working for the few major companies in the business, and many of us had jumped from on...

If you follow this blog you know that I spent that last two weeks in class at work, learning the care and feeding of large natural gas fueled engines that we use to move gas up the pipeline from down here where it’s produced to points east and north where it is needed. The subject matter was a...

Another week learning about those big engines. James commented that they go “pocketa-pocketa” per Walter Mitty. I tend to think they sound more like “hickety-hickety” when they’re running good, but when they’re not, various farts, thumps bangs, thunderclaps, hiccu...

Yes, I was at work today. The morning started out very badly at some time after midnight when all the power in the neighborhood went out. Something happened out on the distribution system and just as I realized the electricity was off, I heard the distant blast of a voltage regulator (looks like a t...

Maybe that was it. Something has crawled into my digestive tract and disturbed a normally robust and well-regulated machine. Events that normally proceed at a sedate and controllable pace have been changed to the regularity (and violence) of explosions in a burning ammo dump. Accordingly I have rele...

I stand by my contention that two people you never want to show up on your job are the safety and environmental guys. Neither is going to help you get things going better. This morning I sat through four freakin’ hours of annual environmental training. We did the big tour through our company&#...