San Diego
Posted in Work on 08/31/2005 07:15 am by enjanerdOk, so I keep forgetting to download pictures when I’m at home, so I’m just going to post about it and put up pictures some time later when I remember.
Flew out of here on Tuesday afternoon and got in kind of early that evening. Found my coworkers, got the rental car, and checked into the hotel, at which point it wasn’t as early anymore. People were kind of anti-social that night, so we didn’t do anything. Made plans to meet for breakfast at 6am and get to work by 6:45.
So, I don’t talk about work much, but I’m an engineer and I went to go do a ship check. Basically, make sure all the things that are supposed to be on the ship are where they’re supposed to be. So, I wandered around and followed pipes, counted up valves, and drew on the fancy tablet computer with all the systems mapped out.
If you haven’t been on a ship before, let me give you an idea of what it’s like. Picture the movie ships or submarines that Hollywood shows you. Now, add grease, grime, and the smell of sealed up salt water. Ok, not really Fast Times at Ridgemont High that bad, but it’s dirty. And gross. And the “stairs” between decks, let’s call them what they are: ladders. And by ladders, picture Jeffrey’s tubes (a la Star Trek) with the dirt and grime mentioned before and 5-story drops. Then picture me, scared of heights, climbing down one of these things. Fun!
Now, most of the spaces I needed to get into did actually have functional stairs on them. They were just very steep and narrow, which I succeeded in bumping my knees on almost every time I went up a deck. And then almost falling down when I went down. Not every time, but at least when I was carrying a laptop around with me, my center of balance was thrown off and I couldn’t compensate effectively enough to keep completely sturdy, so I ended up just walking really slowly the whole time.
Other than that, though, it was a really cool trip. It the first time I ever got to just wander a ship. All the other times I’ve been on a ship, it was on a guided tour with a dozen classmates, so I couldn’t get lost, there wasn’t anything really going on (at least where we could see), and we only saw the interesting stuff. This time, I had to navigate my way around the ship, find alternate routes when the passageways were blocked off for painting or welding, and find spaces labeled “Void #6.” Luckily, I did have a coworker with me for most of the time so I wasn’t completely left to my own devices.
I did, however, take a couple trips around on my own for various reasons. Apparently, having a boy around helps me blend in. Every time I walked around by myself, I got stopped by someone asking me if I was lost, or if was allowed in there, or just what I was doing there. Two people asked me if I was Phillipino and another asked about my One Campaign bracelet (he sounded really excited that he saw someone else with one; he had just gotten his the day before). It seems that a little Chinese girl doesn’t blend in, even if she’s wearing a hardhat.
The whole trip, I saw eight women on the shipyard, including me. That’s counting two women I saw in the women’s bathroom and one who was selling food in one of the trucks on the pier. No wonder I looked so out of place.
I got to see a lot of systems I had only heard about before or seen in drawings. I wandered the bowels of the ship, saw generators and engines, crawled around 8″ pipes, and searched entire engine rooms for 2″ valves labeled in small type. It was definitely an experience.