Five bonus points to whomever knows who said "I've got killin' hands!"

I was planning something very cool. With no notice whatsoever, this Sunday evening I was going to put up a blog post about how nice the weather had been, and end it with "BTW, I'm in Tokyo right now." Cool, eh? Well, my leave has been, not cancelled, but curtailed. I still hope to get in a trip to mainland, but I'm not leaving tomorrow.

So today was another busy stressful day at work. I was the last one there, working the night shift alone. Getting a little hungry at midnight, I pulled a sub out of my lunch box. One of our less brilliant Marines broke the fridge a few months back, so it'd been getting kind of warm in there, but I don't think it had time to turn.

About half way through the sub, I felt some itching. It was a tiny ant crawling down the back of my hand. Irritated, I brushed it off and took another bite of delicious sub. Then it occured to me. Why was the ant crawling down my hand?

I knew what I'd see, but I had to look. I opened up the bread, and sure enough, there were scores of the little buggers inside my sub, busy eating my mayo, and trying to figure out why the scent trail leading back to the nest was gone.

I tossed out the remainder, but I'd eaten quite a bit. Now, I know that there are cultures that eat ants. I'm even aware that insects are present in most of the food we eat. And all the ants that I swallowed were surely no match for my stomach acid. But still, I felt downright queasy.

Moving on, time passed, and I got as much done as I was going to. All the other shops were gone, it was just me and maintenance control. So I got out the tool log, and popped open the toolboxes to make sure all tools were accounted for. ATAF is a critical step in aviation maintenance- tools left inside planes have caused many crashes. And tools left inside parachutes have killed people too.

Looking at the log, I saw that day crew failed to do an ATAF when they left. Whoops. That's bad, can't be making mistakes like that with the inspection starting Monday. Ah well, I'll get my own ATAF and mention it to them tomorrow. Let's see, checking boxes... there was a missing pair of scissors in the shop box.

So I looked for it. For a good half hour. Then I picked up the phone and recalled the whole shop. As you might imagine, people that are going to be at work at 0645 on a Saturday, don't like being woken up to come back to work at 0215. But missing tools are critical, and I was going to get that tool found.

After over two hours of searching, it did turn up. We had seriously searched our entire shop, by the expedient of taking everything into the hanger and searching every container. We found it in someone else's shop, on their desk. Many shops have a pair of scissors to cut paper with; they don't realize that for us, scissors are a tool that must be tracked. In fact, we're not supposed to have any scissors that aren't tracked, because scissors can cut parachutes, life preservers, cargo pendants, and so forth. Someone figured those were office scissors and "borrowed" them while we weren't looking. That makes me unhappy.

Ah well, I should post this and get some sleep, I've got to be back at work in a couple of hours. If we get enough done tomorrow, maybe at least Sunday will be a day off.

Posted by: Boviate at 02:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 637 words, total size 3 kb.