Lead Man From Another Planet

The most curious of the supervisors on my job right now, in terms of my relationship to him, is Hilton Dines. Hilton is a slim black man who makes me think of Barack Obama on speed. He is light-skinned, with green eyes and Caucasian features and he speaks in a refined and educated manner, although his bursts of machine-gun fire speech are staccato and telegraphic. He clearly doesn’t look or sound like he comes from the ‘hood. I don’t know what his background is, but I’ll bet it’s a military family. Under his hardhat he almost always wears a sweatshirt with the hood up. You also often see him wearing a cartridge-type respirator even when he’s out in the open air. When he takes this gear off, however, you see that his shaved head is strangely shaped. He might be the brother from another planet.

During the 5 years I was a QA inspector, I knocked heads with Hilton several times. Once, they had to call a special meeting with him and me and some of the brass from the QA and structural departments just to try to mediate between us. Given this past history, it should be no surprise that the first time I was assigned to work under Hilton after I came back to the structural department I thought maybe he might take the occasion to settle an old score with me. Much to my surprise, however, he was friendly and treated me with respect. I respect him as well, and not just because he respects me, although that’s a big part of it. Even though he’s much too hyper, he at least spends a lot of time on the ship, where a shipyard supervisor should be, and he’s conscientious and not corrupt. I don’t mean corrupt in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that. I mean that he doesn’t use his position to create an easy niche for himself or to manipulate overtime to maximize his own income as many of them do. And even though he’s on the ship a lot, he leaves you pretty much alone and when he talks to you it’s like the two of you are intelligent collaborators. He doesn’t come and tell you a lot of stupid shit you already know.

I hadn’t worked any overtime in a couple of weeks, so last Saturday I volunteered to come in, and because my own job wasn’t working, I worked for Hilton for the day. It was probably the best day I’ve had since I came on this ship. We have removed the king posts -- retractable masts used to support cables that hauled supplies to the ship during replenishment at sea. (Supplies will now be delivered by helicopter.) What I was doing on Saturday was filling in one level of deck in what used to be the trunk that housed the forward king post. Even though this section of deck was small, about 5 feet by 5 feet, we were putting it in in three sections of plate, in part because the deck changed thickness here from 7/16 inch to ¼ inch, but also because it wasn’t an even plane here, but had a knuckle offset of about 10 degrees. This meant that the T-bar stiffener that supported it underneath also had to have a knuckle. Now 19 out of 20 shipfitters would have done the obvious and usual procedure, which would be to fit the plate sections in the deck, then piece in the T-bar underneath. But if they had done that they would have found themselves in trouble, and likely ended up with a mess, because when I trimmed the center plate section to size and fit it temporarily in place, I saw that it had a bow in it. Unless they straightened it first with a temporary stiffener on top, they would not have been able to correctly fit in the sections of T-bar underneath. And this process would have been very time consuming. I chose instead to first make up the T-bar with the proper knuckle in it and fit that up first. It would then be easy to fit the plate sections on top of it. Because of the location and various obstructions, it wasn’t easy to pick up the correct angle from the existing deck, but I came up with a simple solution using a piece of scrap steel angle I found lying around. My burner and I made up the T-bar and tack welded it together. I checked it and the knuckle seemed perfect or close to it. It needed 1/4 inch trimmed off to fit, however, and we had run out of time. Hilton wanted night shift to finish the job, so I marked off where it needed to be trimmed. I was afraid, however, that night shift wouldn’t understand what I was doing and would screw it up. But when I came in and checked it on Monday, they had the whole thing together right and it looked great. Did anybody notice or care? I did, and that’s all that matters to me. Hilton was happy with the job, although I don’t think he fully appreciated the genius involved in my work (ha!).