September 14, 2011

Well, we finally got off of yellow starch.  Also got a couple of new wheelbarrows, which really helps.  Today wasn't too bad, although the wet shaker was being a pain today.  Probably didn't help that the material was so steamy that, by the time I left, it actually started raining inside the building in some spots.  Also been thinking quite a bit about ideas I have.  I'll explain that later, maybe.

September 13, 2011

I hate stone arm days, I really do.  Doesn't make it much better when one of the newer co-workers doesn't really do anything.  He's been working for almost two weeks, has already had three complaints about him doing nothing sent in, that I know of, wanders around back to ask a loader driver if there's anything he can do when the press is overflowing, disappears quite often, and, when I was taking one of the dumpsters of starch bags to the trash compactor, he takes the pallet board I had on top of it, to keep the back from falling out, off and then when I tossed it back on by hand, he goes and tells the supervisor, who I had just told that I was going to bale the bags, that I'm taking the dumpster outside.

Sorry about the vent post.

September 1, 2011

Wow... what a day.  Dust collection plugged up, had some overflow on both the press and the wet shaker.... and that all was before my friend's shift started today!  The messes got cleaned up though, let Mitch keep an eye on the starch for his first day.  He was having some difficulty at first, but, he got better as things started to cool off.  Only other thing that happened today was, as I was taking a bin out to the material piles to dump, got the forklift stuck on a soft spot.  Had to get the loader drive to pull it out.  Wonderful end to the day there.

August 29, 2011

Well, today was a rather interesting and yet confusing day.  We are on a new kind of white starch that, the best way I can describe it is..... salt.  I'm serious, it looks like I'm dumping fifty pound bags of salt.  Other than that, our things to do today were to fill up the blue and silver silos, then when the silver got close to empty, switch formulas so by the time it did go empty, the new formula should be coming out of the dryer so we can run it to silver.  It takes about two and a half hours for briquettes to get through the dryer, and the silver silo holds about eighteen feet of briquettes when it's full.  Here's the confusing part, we continued to run to silver, after we had filled it up, and were still running the formula we were running.  Kinda hard for Bagging to empty a silo we are still running to.

August 24, 2011

Today hasn't been too bad of a day back at work.  We're on white starch, but we were trying out some new kind of crop coal.  The wet shaker overflowed a bit too, but overall a good day, although I have a new injury. While I was trying to clean off the scraper we use for the wet shaker with a little hand scraper, it slipped and cut my finger.  It kind of feels and looks like a paper cut now, except not quite as painful as a paper cut.

August 18, 2011

So, we're back on yellow starch.  Yippee.  Press overflowed, so, had a bit of a mess.  Also had a bit of an accident when the forklift was dieing on me.  As if the thing wasn't jumpy enough.  Went to grab a starch pallet on the third level, ended up grabbing a bag on the second and pulled a couple off.  Yea, wasn't a good day for me with the forklift.  What a day, huh?

August 11, 2011

So yea, I decided to just put the date for the daily blog posts instead of counting the days.  Figure it'll be easier to keep track of that way, means my daily posts will probably be at the end of the day like they have been.

Now, I figure some of my readers, like most of the people I know in real life, are probably curious about what I do at the charcoal plant.  They want to know what my typical day is like at work.  Well, this is how my typical day goes: