The storm room....duh duh duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
So yesterday was my first experience in the storm room and I actually really liked it. Dispatch may be something to look into for my future as a way to combat my incessant laziness since it's so high energy and so "fix this problem right now!". Anyway, around 1:30 yesterday afternoon my mentor, Jim, asked if I would like to learn how the storm room worked and help out in there for the rest of the day. I thought that would definitely be cool so I took him up on his offer. One of the guys in charge thought it was just too busy for anyone to teach me anything so Jim took me into his office and at least taught me the computer system we use to track customer calls and outages. Then he asked Jack, who was working as analyzer (i guess this is a job planning engineers often do in the storm room), if i could hang out with him and kind of watch what he was doing. Our job was too look at where the customers were calling in from, see what the computer was predicting for what the problem was based on customer calls, and make a human prediction. This was of coursed based on looking to see where the largest outages were and trying to take care of those first to get the most customers restored. It was like mini scavenger hunts! Once we pinpointed the problem we would print a sheet and fill in the info, enter our prediction into the computer as necessary, and turn our printout over to the dispatcher to dispatch the trucks.
Next thing I know it's 7:00 and we're ordering dinner and Jack lets me start doing all the computer entry so that i can learn the job hands on. Then it's 10:00 ...the hours are flying by. At 10:00 we get a new job to start checking a separate list of no powers to see if they've been cleared or are being worked on. If we seem to have lost track of them we call the customer to make sure they have been restored that way if they haven't we can make sure they are in the queue to be repaired (hence whey we start doing this at 10:00...need to get through the phone calls before 11:00). At 11:30 Jack gets to leave since he'll be bird-dogging for a line crew on the southshore the next morning at 7:30 and he needs to get his 8 hours rest time so now I'm all on my own at the job. At 12:30 we have a shift change to fresh employees who have been on rest for 8 hours and we all head home for our 8 hours of rest before we need to be back for our regular Thursday shifts (although an hour later). Is it bad when you don't mind working 17 hours and leave with a smile on your face?
Next thing I know it's 7:00 and we're ordering dinner and Jack lets me start doing all the computer entry so that i can learn the job hands on. Then it's 10:00 ...the hours are flying by. At 10:00 we get a new job to start checking a separate list of no powers to see if they've been cleared or are being worked on. If we seem to have lost track of them we call the customer to make sure they have been restored that way if they haven't we can make sure they are in the queue to be repaired (hence whey we start doing this at 10:00...need to get through the phone calls before 11:00). At 11:30 Jack gets to leave since he'll be bird-dogging for a line crew on the southshore the next morning at 7:30 and he needs to get his 8 hours rest time so now I'm all on my own at the job. At 12:30 we have a shift change to fresh employees who have been on rest for 8 hours and we all head home for our 8 hours of rest before we need to be back for our regular Thursday shifts (although an hour later). Is it bad when you don't mind working 17 hours and leave with a smile on your face?