A bit about my day...

[simonali]

I feel your pain, gbb, even if no-one else does.

I'm a maintenance engineer, too and have had some gruelling shifts lately. I'm the first to admit that when the day is going well it can be the easy life at work, but when it all goes tits up it's not a pleasant job. I work at a big plant and quite often have to cover 12 hour shifts on my own, including over a year with no shift partner.

I have to know about steam and refrigeration plant, water treatment, process and packing lines, CIP systems, PLCs, Profibus and AS-i networks and valve matrixes with hundreds of valves in them and that's on top of the 146 steps you have to walk up to get from the bottom of the factory to the top level (whilst carrying a big toolkit). This can be in temperatures from -10 to +45 degrees and noise levels of between 80-100dB!

 

[summerdays]

gbb you took me back to the days of my youth ... first summer job ever ... my friend and I went for it and decided we would take the job if they paid at least £20 a week ... imagine how rich we felt that they would pay us £65!!!

On day 3 they moved us down into the warehouse to take the stuff off the lines and pack onto crates. Then it went completely wrong ... the 12 packs of toothpaste came down faster than we could put on the crates ... huge pile up (and gooey toothpaste) ensued at the end of the line - upstairs couldn't see the mess downstairs and just kept sending down more toothpaste. All the guys on the fork lift trucks abandoned what they were doing to come and help too.

Made some good friends that day - but was quickly moved to a different part of the factory for the rest of the summer. And at the end of the month every employee got a bag of damaged goods as standard - apparently there was a lot more toothpaste in them than normal

 

[dan_bo]

Had an arse of a week myself......Over in Denmark.

Two instruments in the same lab, both wanting a maintainence visit. first one.....no probs. Running like a sewing machine. Second one...........absolute arse. Rough pump hadn't been touched for four years and the front end had last been tightened up by a chuffing gorrila so all the threads had been jumped and what wasn't stripped was corroded. Nice.


Trying to maintain an air of ultra-cleanliness and high precision whilst wielding a drill, a blowtorch and a pair of pliers isn't an easy task.

 

[Fab Foodie]

LOL gbb
I know your day! I've had many whilst commisioning Food Processing lines, all of a suden it all goes wrong and there's usually a hairy arsed production supervisor breathing down your neck informing you of the cost of the down-time whilst you're trying to figure out what's gone awry
Worked a shrimp factory in Penzance, all ran well all day and into the early evening, it was about 9 pm when the manager said "Just one more bin of shrimp" (about 30-40 mins running) whereapon the freezer locked-up solid and it took 'till about 1 am to defrost it and shovel out the debris...

 

[MrGrumpy]

Bloody hell, thats the three maintenance engineers on this site now I`ve had days like that not often mind but at least there are 4 guys in total on shift so not so bad. My biggest worry is mail failure, you see we get fined lots of money if we don`t meet our target, and if we do fail its like a nazi interogation to see what went wrong, don`t ya love blame culture ! Can be interesting at times tho, other times boring as hell but each day is never the same.

 

[Dayvo]

Don't know what you lot are whingeing about!

I haven't worked since the end of October!

But my 8-month straight 'shift' starts tomorrow week!

 

[Aperitif]

Don't know what you lot are whingeing about!

I haven't worked since the end of October!

But my 8-month straight 'shift' starts tomorrow week!

The grass is always greener on the other side for Dayvo.
Or he gets the chop.

Happy greenkeeping!

 

[gbb]

LOL gbb
I know your day! I've had many whilst commisioning Food Processing lines, all of a suden it all goes wrong and there's usually a hairy arsed production supervisor breathing down your neck informing you of the cost of the down-time whilst you're trying to figure out what's gone awry
Worked a shrimp factory in Penzance, all ran well all day and into the early evening, it was about 9 pm when the manager said "Just one more bin of shrimp" (about 30-40 mins running) whereapon the freezer locked-up solid and it took 'till about 1 am to defrost it and shovel out the debris...

My worst was in Uruguay...they'de assembled a packing line we'd tested, ran and sent out to them. I arrived to hook up the communications and computer.......and it ran like a pig
Spent 3 or 4 days talking endlessly to the Spanish speaking engineers, my ex colleague here, the agents engineer and the Spanish manufacturers, all trying to get to the bottom of it.
3 or 4 solid days of headaches and stress, trying to absorb information that was way above my head (i'm not an electrician) 1 main circuit board blew for no apparent reason, the low voltage communication lines had 220v running through them ...that gave me rude awakening ...and so on, and so on.

It transpired they had no normal neutral, so had 'generated' it at an incoming transformer (to this day, i stil dont understand the principe). That buggered up the PLC's, thats why nothing would work properly.
I struggled to eat (the food was not very good anyway, and coupled with the stress of the problems), i went off my food for about a month. I lost a stone in weight...and i'm not a big guy to start with

Problems at the end of the shift...yup, that happens, just when you think you're going home. All of a sudden, you face another 1,2,3 4 hours of work