Factory Work: Two Days In The Life Of A Midlander
6street asked on a chulu chat once what I really did when I said "I worked with wires". I'm sure she doesn't actually give a shit to want this much of a detailed reply, but when I realised I would have to work the HARDEST four day stretch of cabling, patching, IT setup and cat5ing of my freaking life this week (I am currently on day two), I decided to survive it through promising myself to write it up for lj the following day.
(Of course, this implies this entry was supposed to be one day in the life of a midlander - which it originally was, but I worked 12 hours and fell asleep right in the middle of trying to catch up on my flist.)
Inside!: Why asbestos is now covering my lungs, why MANLYNESS is awesome, why my baby is 175m long, why recycling is a pointless exercise 1/2 the time, and I get all ranty about how wasteful the English are.
...WITH PICTURES! :D
Here be rats, dirty needles and the career prospects of anyone without a University degree.
(I promise some of the pictures are prettier than this.)
I have found that the best asbestos stories always begin with the phrase: "Hey, you know that wall you've just drilled that 10cm hole through?"
That was the beginning of day one. My father and my uncle and me are our own little team now my father is back and working (yay, the Davises are all snuggly). Previously, I was on the machines, which is pretty dull stuff, although I'm not allowed to press any buttons because I'm not certified. The work is in a recycling factory known as "Dave's". I'm sure it has a real name, but fuck it if "Dave's Recycling" doesn't sound awesome enough to not need one. Now my father is back, I could start doing the "real thing".
The "real thing" is taking 175m of cable from inside the factory and connecting it to somewhere 175m away. (For you yanks, that's 574.146982 feet.) To put this in perspective, it's half the height of the Effiel Tower or 70m longer than Wembley Stadium. And it's not just one cable - oh no, that would be too easy - it's ten lengths of cat5 (Network - internet and we're using it for phones), 4 RG6 (UHF - Video Cameras), 1 armoured fibre cable (Hardcore internet - Internet that will survive the eventual nuclear holocaust which will end the world).
It's this, basically:
Awesomely over-sized leather gloves make an illustrative image, I find
Really, this might mean very little to you, because you think "hey, I could measure out 175m of those cables, no problem, it doesn't look very thick..."
THESE ARE THE PROBLEMS
1) The Armored fibre is FUCKING ARMORED. It's heavy as shit and impossible to cut.
2) Cat5 arrives in crappy bastards of boxes, not cable reels, so they jam every four fucking minutes when you try to pull it out.
3) We don't have a 175m flat run - we have a topsy turvy mother fuckery factory to do this on.
4) Dirty. Dirty everything. The tools are dirty, the floor is dirty - eventually you look like an extra on The Black and White Minstrel Show.
(1 is only a problem due to the fact that I happen to be a girl because, as anyone who works at Dave's loves to point out that I have the upper body strength of a joke rubber chicken. And cutting only really happens once, and I didn't have to do it anyway. The other three are fucking important and fucking irritating.)
But of course, it's one thing to say "Hey, get 175m of cable from here to here" when you actually mean "Hey, get 175m of cable to join from this elevated platform across through this wall and then along this outdoor wall and through this jungle of forest and then into another building"
This is where the asbestos wall comes into action.
Where the ladder is - that's where I was. Of course, I was supposed to have a harness, hardhat, footer, correct ladder, health and safety form filled out... I totally had a high visibility jacket, though.
I went up a fucking ladder sans mask because masks are for women, and I am man. (This is a typical phrase, because the before-PC saying was "I'm not a puff" - take into mind, the average Dave's Factory worker is about 37, male and supports Aston Villa - so we use "FOR I AM MAN" because manlyness is a genderless quality which embodies strength and stupidity in roughly equal amounts.)
I drilled a god damn manly hole into that wall - I fucked that wall - and then my uncle throws a mask at me (up a god damn ladder 12ft off the ground) and goes "DON'T YOU WANT TO LIVE? YOUR DAD'S GONNA FUCK ME IF YOU GET CANCER"
So, I had been breathing in fumes. But I can't care, because that was a pretty manly hole.
If you look at the above photo, you'll see a dangling wire which is the cable. Technically, the asbestos incident wasn't at the absolute beginning of day one, it was around 12pm, as the morning had been spent making the wire. The wire is now my child. You really have to do it to believe how attached you can get to a few wires. It's freaking huge. I actually understand that thing where men are proud of the size of their dicks. You get such a sense of accomplishment knowing you can create something that fuck you huge.
My baby ;___; My beautiful, beautiful coiled baby.
Making a cable is 2% planning, 20% arsing around and 78% cable tying. Cable ties have littered my floor since I was a rather small child, and my sister nearly lost a finger when she tied one on too tight. Cable tying is a rather small issue, but when you have to do it 500 times, it gets a bit boring. Luckily, I has an ipod. But in making my playlist of "Music loud enough to be heard over waste disposal units" I realised I had in fact formed a Burnballs fanmix >.> I can't help it! I love Teenage Kicks too much! ...And Andy Burnham is really fucking pretty! D:
This is cable tying:
Featured: Random man (Jeff?) who held the cable while I took the photo. The cable gun is badass, but painful on the hand.
Took one hour of clipping the ends up, but it was all nice.
We connected the cable over day one. This was an incredibly tiring job (having to put it up on the wall into special guttering, clambering through foliage and stuff) but hard to illustrate. Basically, remember your childhood.
Do you remember climbing through things? Do you remember making stupid risks jumping from unsteady brick to unsteady brick? Do you remember climbing frames, jungle jims, all of that?
Okay, so, basically that - but with a fuck heavy cable on your shoulder and over a live substation. (That thing was HUMMING D:)
I collapsed in my bed when I got home, pleased.
I went up fuck high to get that off the ground, then we had to replace it because it wasn't "neat" enough for my father.
Day two was patching. Patching is connecting cable to a big computer bay and changing from copper wire to usable internet. I like patching because I don't need to breathe in aerated methane for hours and hours. The little factory in which I was patching is my father's company - a company made for reusing.
Reusing and recycling are two different things (part of the trio of Ed Miliband's wet dreams - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.) Dave noticed that 1/2 the shit he got into the factory for recycling actually worked - Computers, printers, speakers, UPSes, screens, video cameras, fridges, everything - some of these worked.
My father, on one of his highs, decided it was a great idea to start a company to second-hand this shit, because PROFIT.
I have always been skeptical until today. Probably, because due to the nature of my father, I have been introduced to "The Scheme That Will Make Us Millions" approximately a billion times in my young life. He brought home speakers to demonstrate this, and none of them sold. But he insisted and, to that end, he took a metric fucktonne of industrial grade recyclables and dumped them in the little office-come-factory one day and left it.
I walked into that factory to fit internet but, instead, dropped the damn crone tool on my foot.
How BIG have you ever seen a television?
A HD one? With computer and television input?
19"? 32"? The highest I could find on the internet was 55"
This thing is literally 91 INCHES long. That hat is a normal hat! NINETY FUCKING ONE INCHES. It came from Tesco as part of their display - it was never to be sold on the market, it's one of the huge fuckers you see advertising their products at their bigger stores. You couldn't even attach this to a regular wall without industrial bolts. Hell, you'd have to check your fucking walls are large enough.
But worse than that:
THERE ARE TWENTY OF THEM.
AND
THEY ALL WORK.
We don't know why Tesco has dumped them, but they all fucking work! This is where I stop talking about patching and start ranting about the state of reuse in this country.
...How are we in such a state that 91" televisions are fine to be ground up, melted down and chucked away? Pubs? Clubs? Hell, me? I'll take a television before you skip it, Tesco, me old chum. The internal workings in this thing would be a disaster to the environment - even through recycling - and it fucking works!
See, in the factory, there are two states of things: shit and oh my god. Shit is broken, oh my god is incredible. 50 UPSes going for 50 quid each on ebay - chucked because the battery ran down it was cheaper to buy more rather than pay a guy. 100 computers, chucked because they don't have a power lead. Metric tonnes of usable stuff which is botched and thrown away because it's out of date.
I fucking hate "out of date". I think it was the Now Show which mentioned we are now throwing away stuff which our grandparents would make last for a lifetime. Yeah, I have a MacBook Pro, but my old PC went through Windows 95, 98, 2000 and almost XP before we ditched it. And it isn't even ditched - we're using it as a server. Reusing is so much kinder to the environment than recycling, but everyone seems to think that it's "green" enough just to concentrate on that third of the cycle.
These speakers work. This amp works. As a radio, CD and cassette player. We assume the amp was ditched because it doesn't have an iPod in plug (but it does have an input which could take an iPod if you had a 50p jack-to-jack lead - the kind of thing a household electric guitar would use.) The speakers were probably thrown because the amp they were paired with didn't work. That box down the front is a subwoofer. I practically rode that thing around the room - it goddamn works. It just has a 10cm scratch down the side. I want it all, but the television won't make it to Manchester without being destroyed... but there is still hope for the guy magnet that is a surround system.
I'm helping my father and uncle sort this from now on. It's insane and frankly disgusting that in this economic and environmental climate that this stuff is just chucked! But there is one problem.
At Dave's, we have a saying: If you can think it, we have it. If we don't have it, it's probably been stolen.
We've lost 20 speakers to thieves and I expect a call tomorrow saying "there's been another break in". They've increased security, and we hope the bastards won't find a way to move 91" televisions over a locked gate, but Dave employs ex-cons who talk to their not-so-ex-con mates and...
yeah.
And the most ironic thing is that they're probably stealing because they've lost their jobs. Because of job cuts. Like those in the environmental sector.
Oh, George Osborne. Why do you hate my 91" plasma and my 5 speaker surround chick magnets?
I hate to leave this on such a painfully "AHHH CONSERVATIVE" note, but to be fair, if Labour's reuse bill hadn't been stalled and ripped up by the General Election, my father wouldn't have been able to have saved this. Because of ~red tape~ and ~safety~.
Well, it's 10pm and I started writing this at 8:30, and I have a 8am start tomorrow. But before I depart for bed, look at the stuff around your room. Maybe something you're thinking of replacing. Do you really need it? Can't you make do?
I don't know, guys. I started this epically happy and ended on a crushingly sad note. I'm not a big environMENTALIST, but even Top Gear says chucking your old cars is stupid. I'm at the triage of stuff, and everything we can't save... goes straight in a pit to poison the Earth.
Think twice, England. Reduce - but REUSE. Fuck off, recycling!
I'm going to take more photos in the next two days, showing the awesome finds. It's just fun to imagine the lives these things have led and what sent them here. ^.^
(Of course, this implies this entry was supposed to be one day in the life of a midlander - which it originally was, but I worked 12 hours and fell asleep right in the middle of trying to catch up on my flist.)
Inside!: Why asbestos is now covering my lungs, why MANLYNESS is awesome, why my baby is 175m long, why recycling is a pointless exercise 1/2 the time, and I get all ranty about how wasteful the English are.
...WITH PICTURES! :D
Here be rats, dirty needles and the career prospects of anyone without a University degree.
(I promise some of the pictures are prettier than this.)
I have found that the best asbestos stories always begin with the phrase: "Hey, you know that wall you've just drilled that 10cm hole through?"
That was the beginning of day one. My father and my uncle and me are our own little team now my father is back and working (yay, the Davises are all snuggly). Previously, I was on the machines, which is pretty dull stuff, although I'm not allowed to press any buttons because I'm not certified. The work is in a recycling factory known as "Dave's". I'm sure it has a real name, but fuck it if "Dave's Recycling" doesn't sound awesome enough to not need one. Now my father is back, I could start doing the "real thing".
The "real thing" is taking 175m of cable from inside the factory and connecting it to somewhere 175m away. (For you yanks, that's 574.146982 feet.) To put this in perspective, it's half the height of the Effiel Tower or 70m longer than Wembley Stadium. And it's not just one cable - oh no, that would be too easy - it's ten lengths of cat5 (Network - internet and we're using it for phones), 4 RG6 (UHF - Video Cameras), 1 armoured fibre cable (Hardcore internet - Internet that will survive the eventual nuclear holocaust which will end the world).
It's this, basically:
Awesomely over-sized leather gloves make an illustrative image, I find
Really, this might mean very little to you, because you think "hey, I could measure out 175m of those cables, no problem, it doesn't look very thick..."
THESE ARE THE PROBLEMS
1) The Armored fibre is FUCKING ARMORED. It's heavy as shit and impossible to cut.
2) Cat5 arrives in crappy bastards of boxes, not cable reels, so they jam every four fucking minutes when you try to pull it out.
3) We don't have a 175m flat run - we have a topsy turvy mother fuckery factory to do this on.
4) Dirty. Dirty everything. The tools are dirty, the floor is dirty - eventually you look like an extra on The Black and White Minstrel Show.
(1 is only a problem due to the fact that I happen to be a girl because, as anyone who works at Dave's loves to point out that I have the upper body strength of a joke rubber chicken. And cutting only really happens once, and I didn't have to do it anyway. The other three are fucking important and fucking irritating.)
But of course, it's one thing to say "Hey, get 175m of cable from here to here" when you actually mean "Hey, get 175m of cable to join from this elevated platform across through this wall and then along this outdoor wall and through this jungle of forest and then into another building"
This is where the asbestos wall comes into action.
Where the ladder is - that's where I was. Of course, I was supposed to have a harness, hardhat, footer, correct ladder, health and safety form filled out... I totally had a high visibility jacket, though.
I went up a fucking ladder sans mask because masks are for women, and I am man. (This is a typical phrase, because the before-PC saying was "I'm not a puff" - take into mind, the average Dave's Factory worker is about 37, male and supports Aston Villa - so we use "FOR I AM MAN" because manlyness is a genderless quality which embodies strength and stupidity in roughly equal amounts.)
I drilled a god damn manly hole into that wall - I fucked that wall - and then my uncle throws a mask at me (up a god damn ladder 12ft off the ground) and goes "DON'T YOU WANT TO LIVE? YOUR DAD'S GONNA FUCK ME IF YOU GET CANCER"
So, I had been breathing in fumes. But I can't care, because that was a pretty manly hole.
If you look at the above photo, you'll see a dangling wire which is the cable. Technically, the asbestos incident wasn't at the absolute beginning of day one, it was around 12pm, as the morning had been spent making the wire. The wire is now my child. You really have to do it to believe how attached you can get to a few wires. It's freaking huge. I actually understand that thing where men are proud of the size of their dicks. You get such a sense of accomplishment knowing you can create something that fuck you huge.
My baby ;___; My beautiful, beautiful coiled baby.
Making a cable is 2% planning, 20% arsing around and 78% cable tying. Cable ties have littered my floor since I was a rather small child, and my sister nearly lost a finger when she tied one on too tight. Cable tying is a rather small issue, but when you have to do it 500 times, it gets a bit boring. Luckily, I has an ipod. But in making my playlist of "Music loud enough to be heard over waste disposal units" I realised I had in fact formed a Burnballs fanmix >.> I can't help it! I love Teenage Kicks too much! ...And Andy Burnham is really fucking pretty! D:
This is cable tying:
Featured: Random man (Jeff?) who held the cable while I took the photo. The cable gun is badass, but painful on the hand.
Took one hour of clipping the ends up, but it was all nice.
We connected the cable over day one. This was an incredibly tiring job (having to put it up on the wall into special guttering, clambering through foliage and stuff) but hard to illustrate. Basically, remember your childhood.
Do you remember climbing through things? Do you remember making stupid risks jumping from unsteady brick to unsteady brick? Do you remember climbing frames, jungle jims, all of that?
Okay, so, basically that - but with a fuck heavy cable on your shoulder and over a live substation. (That thing was HUMMING D:)
I collapsed in my bed when I got home, pleased.
I went up fuck high to get that off the ground, then we had to replace it because it wasn't "neat" enough for my father.
Day two was patching. Patching is connecting cable to a big computer bay and changing from copper wire to usable internet. I like patching because I don't need to breathe in aerated methane for hours and hours. The little factory in which I was patching is my father's company - a company made for reusing.
Reusing and recycling are two different things (part of the trio of Ed Miliband's wet dreams - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.) Dave noticed that 1/2 the shit he got into the factory for recycling actually worked - Computers, printers, speakers, UPSes, screens, video cameras, fridges, everything - some of these worked.
My father, on one of his highs, decided it was a great idea to start a company to second-hand this shit, because PROFIT.
I have always been skeptical until today. Probably, because due to the nature of my father, I have been introduced to "The Scheme That Will Make Us Millions" approximately a billion times in my young life. He brought home speakers to demonstrate this, and none of them sold. But he insisted and, to that end, he took a metric fucktonne of industrial grade recyclables and dumped them in the little office-come-factory one day and left it.
I walked into that factory to fit internet but, instead, dropped the damn crone tool on my foot.
How BIG have you ever seen a television?
A HD one? With computer and television input?
19"? 32"? The highest I could find on the internet was 55"
This thing is literally 91 INCHES long. That hat is a normal hat! NINETY FUCKING ONE INCHES. It came from Tesco as part of their display - it was never to be sold on the market, it's one of the huge fuckers you see advertising their products at their bigger stores. You couldn't even attach this to a regular wall without industrial bolts. Hell, you'd have to check your fucking walls are large enough.
But worse than that:
THERE ARE TWENTY OF THEM.
AND
THEY ALL WORK.
We don't know why Tesco has dumped them, but they all fucking work! This is where I stop talking about patching and start ranting about the state of reuse in this country.
...How are we in such a state that 91" televisions are fine to be ground up, melted down and chucked away? Pubs? Clubs? Hell, me? I'll take a television before you skip it, Tesco, me old chum. The internal workings in this thing would be a disaster to the environment - even through recycling - and it fucking works!
See, in the factory, there are two states of things: shit and oh my god. Shit is broken, oh my god is incredible. 50 UPSes going for 50 quid each on ebay - chucked because the battery ran down it was cheaper to buy more rather than pay a guy. 100 computers, chucked because they don't have a power lead. Metric tonnes of usable stuff which is botched and thrown away because it's out of date.
I fucking hate "out of date". I think it was the Now Show which mentioned we are now throwing away stuff which our grandparents would make last for a lifetime. Yeah, I have a MacBook Pro, but my old PC went through Windows 95, 98, 2000 and almost XP before we ditched it. And it isn't even ditched - we're using it as a server. Reusing is so much kinder to the environment than recycling, but everyone seems to think that it's "green" enough just to concentrate on that third of the cycle.
These speakers work. This amp works. As a radio, CD and cassette player. We assume the amp was ditched because it doesn't have an iPod in plug (but it does have an input which could take an iPod if you had a 50p jack-to-jack lead - the kind of thing a household electric guitar would use.) The speakers were probably thrown because the amp they were paired with didn't work. That box down the front is a subwoofer. I practically rode that thing around the room - it goddamn works. It just has a 10cm scratch down the side. I want it all, but the television won't make it to Manchester without being destroyed... but there is still hope for the guy magnet that is a surround system.
I'm helping my father and uncle sort this from now on. It's insane and frankly disgusting that in this economic and environmental climate that this stuff is just chucked! But there is one problem.
At Dave's, we have a saying: If you can think it, we have it. If we don't have it, it's probably been stolen.
We've lost 20 speakers to thieves and I expect a call tomorrow saying "there's been another break in". They've increased security, and we hope the bastards won't find a way to move 91" televisions over a locked gate, but Dave employs ex-cons who talk to their not-so-ex-con mates and...
yeah.
And the most ironic thing is that they're probably stealing because they've lost their jobs. Because of job cuts. Like those in the environmental sector.
Oh, George Osborne. Why do you hate my 91" plasma and my 5 speaker surround chick magnets?
I hate to leave this on such a painfully "AHHH CONSERVATIVE" note, but to be fair, if Labour's reuse bill hadn't been stalled and ripped up by the General Election, my father wouldn't have been able to have saved this. Because of ~red tape~ and ~safety~.
Well, it's 10pm and I started writing this at 8:30, and I have a 8am start tomorrow. But before I depart for bed, look at the stuff around your room. Maybe something you're thinking of replacing. Do you really need it? Can't you make do?
I don't know, guys. I started this epically happy and ended on a crushingly sad note. I'm not a big environMENTALIST, but even Top Gear says chucking your old cars is stupid. I'm at the triage of stuff, and everything we can't save... goes straight in a pit to poison the Earth.
Think twice, England. Reduce - but REUSE. Fuck off, recycling!
I'm going to take more photos in the next two days, showing the awesome finds. It's just fun to imagine the lives these things have led and what sent them here. ^.^