Summer Days
(Pubby's Note: Well, it’s been a while now, and I haven’t written anything I can put up on my blog; thought I’d describe a typical day at my summer training/internship. Also, now that I’m in solitary again, I have returned to my non-proofed narrative thinking/writing. So here goes)
This place is huge. In length, breadth, and height. And the number of people. And it’s organised. Thoroughly. From people to paper clips. There’s umpteen departments, different machine shops, foundries, core shops, and loads of other things that are all supposed to do their own little bit to add value to the whole. Some seem to work more, some less, but all of them pretty much curse one another in a tussle for one-upmanship where the only benefit they may accrue is respect from a management that they don’t respect.
My day here usually starts with a glass of water, 5 minutes on gtalk (via gmail) and 20 minutes or so of solitaire on my cellphone while I wait for it to strike 10. Then on, I move to my cabin, a deserted room that three General Managers have occupied (and left) in the last 8 months. It’s a nice room, half-white, half-wooden, with a polished desk and a monitor and mouse with well-concealed wires, and nobody’s the wiser that they lead to nothing. I like the desk, though it does cause some awkwardness when people walk in to ask how you're getting along. You can see that it’s the office they’ve been wanting for months, maybe years, one that has been callously given away to the boss’s son for 6 weeks. I try to make it less awkward, standing up when they come in, asking them not to sit on the opposite side, sometimes keeping us both standing; doesn’t really change much though.
I have 4 books in this room to keep me occupied. One is a CNC programming manual, another’s a Thomas Hardy novel, and the other two are CAT prep books. I keep to the first two. Before half an hour of perusing them is over, though, someone always drops in to ask me if I’d like to go to one machine shop or the other for a hands-on programming experience, or just to see how stuff works. It’s generally an offer you just can’t refuse, everything outside the office is way too fascinating to miss. I can pass several hours in the machine shop without a break. As I said, there’s lots going on here, and I want to go out knowing as much as possible, though I really don’t know why.
Afternoons are nice, lunch generally lasts an hour, and I get a lot of wisdom talk and those-were-the-days dialogues from dad and his friend-and-colleague. It’s fun, really, to see people can be this chilled out with 30 projects going on simultaneously.
Post-lunch is dreary though. I return to the manual, but sleep generally tries to butt in in about half an hour. To keep myself up, I go out of the nice, 25 degrees C atmosphere to the blasting, at least 50 outside, and take a promenade around the place. I always end up passing by the ferrous foundry, hoping maybe today I’ll have the courage to step in. But no. Needless to say, it’s the volcano of the plant; but here in the heat there’s something very wrong about it. Even when you’re about 6 feet away you can hardly see anything inside. There’s a black fog of iron ore at the entrance, interrupted only by tired people, covered with soot, with shirts torn at the seams coming out at intervals with a trolley of castings, escorting them to a salon that thinks nothing of hacking away at them at 3000rpm to make them shapely. They have a scarf around their heads and what looks like a surgical mask on. The situation is so depressing you forget the humour in two guys walking side-by-side pushing the trolley, almost clasping hands. No. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.
Post lunch I generally go bug someone in a machine shop. The initial shyness of approaching them just melts under the heat. The first thing I learnt here probably was that it isn’t school or college. People actually want to teach you here. Everybody’s motivated by the fact that they’ve done something in their lives, and they’re all very willing to tell you about it. Every day I hear the words, “It’s really good you’re doing this right now. You’ll get to learn a lot, if you pay attention”. I don’t know if it’s that or the fact that the guys now have someone willing, even eager to hear them about their work, and how they make a living, but our own ideas seem to give us both some gratification.
Past 6 is generally a bore. I gather my books and move back into dad’s office, where we both sit around and chat, waiting for my uncle to get free from his workplace. The wait has been anywhere from an hour to two for 9 out of the last 10 days (the 10th day dad was late by that amount).
A dull ride back home follows. It’s always Red FM playing in the car. Non-stop. I now remember not just the order of the songs, but the ads and other sound bytes meant for our “infotainment” as well. Real estate ads are annoying, and targeting just the wrong people. Listening to the government-recorded PSU employment ad is like seeing a man desperate to pass a mirage off as an oasis, even if it means drinking the sand. It’s bad, and not fooling any one. Radios need a revolution.
This place is huge. In length, breadth, and height. And the number of people. And it’s organised. Thoroughly. From people to paper clips. There’s umpteen departments, different machine shops, foundries, core shops, and loads of other things that are all supposed to do their own little bit to add value to the whole. Some seem to work more, some less, but all of them pretty much curse one another in a tussle for one-upmanship where the only benefit they may accrue is respect from a management that they don’t respect.
My day here usually starts with a glass of water, 5 minutes on gtalk (via gmail) and 20 minutes or so of solitaire on my cellphone while I wait for it to strike 10. Then on, I move to my cabin, a deserted room that three General Managers have occupied (and left) in the last 8 months. It’s a nice room, half-white, half-wooden, with a polished desk and a monitor and mouse with well-concealed wires, and nobody’s the wiser that they lead to nothing. I like the desk, though it does cause some awkwardness when people walk in to ask how you're getting along. You can see that it’s the office they’ve been wanting for months, maybe years, one that has been callously given away to the boss’s son for 6 weeks. I try to make it less awkward, standing up when they come in, asking them not to sit on the opposite side, sometimes keeping us both standing; doesn’t really change much though.
I have 4 books in this room to keep me occupied. One is a CNC programming manual, another’s a Thomas Hardy novel, and the other two are CAT prep books. I keep to the first two. Before half an hour of perusing them is over, though, someone always drops in to ask me if I’d like to go to one machine shop or the other for a hands-on programming experience, or just to see how stuff works. It’s generally an offer you just can’t refuse, everything outside the office is way too fascinating to miss. I can pass several hours in the machine shop without a break. As I said, there’s lots going on here, and I want to go out knowing as much as possible, though I really don’t know why.
Afternoons are nice, lunch generally lasts an hour, and I get a lot of wisdom talk and those-were-the-days dialogues from dad and his friend-and-colleague. It’s fun, really, to see people can be this chilled out with 30 projects going on simultaneously.
Post-lunch is dreary though. I return to the manual, but sleep generally tries to butt in in about half an hour. To keep myself up, I go out of the nice, 25 degrees C atmosphere to the blasting, at least 50 outside, and take a promenade around the place. I always end up passing by the ferrous foundry, hoping maybe today I’ll have the courage to step in. But no. Needless to say, it’s the volcano of the plant; but here in the heat there’s something very wrong about it. Even when you’re about 6 feet away you can hardly see anything inside. There’s a black fog of iron ore at the entrance, interrupted only by tired people, covered with soot, with shirts torn at the seams coming out at intervals with a trolley of castings, escorting them to a salon that thinks nothing of hacking away at them at 3000rpm to make them shapely. They have a scarf around their heads and what looks like a surgical mask on. The situation is so depressing you forget the humour in two guys walking side-by-side pushing the trolley, almost clasping hands. No. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.
Post lunch I generally go bug someone in a machine shop. The initial shyness of approaching them just melts under the heat. The first thing I learnt here probably was that it isn’t school or college. People actually want to teach you here. Everybody’s motivated by the fact that they’ve done something in their lives, and they’re all very willing to tell you about it. Every day I hear the words, “It’s really good you’re doing this right now. You’ll get to learn a lot, if you pay attention”. I don’t know if it’s that or the fact that the guys now have someone willing, even eager to hear them about their work, and how they make a living, but our own ideas seem to give us both some gratification.
Past 6 is generally a bore. I gather my books and move back into dad’s office, where we both sit around and chat, waiting for my uncle to get free from his workplace. The wait has been anywhere from an hour to two for 9 out of the last 10 days (the 10th day dad was late by that amount).
A dull ride back home follows. It’s always Red FM playing in the car. Non-stop. I now remember not just the order of the songs, but the ads and other sound bytes meant for our “infotainment” as well. Real estate ads are annoying, and targeting just the wrong people. Listening to the government-recorded PSU employment ad is like seeing a man desperate to pass a mirage off as an oasis, even if it means drinking the sand. It’s bad, and not fooling any one. Radios need a revolution.
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