Deja Vu

For three weeks I worked outside the yard, at the Navy Base. When the work there petered out they sent me back to the yard. But they didn't keep me there. They gave me what one of my co-workers called the "double whammy." They brought me back to the yard from the Navy Base bad)and sent me to a job at the yard next door to us (worse).

That yard is supposed to be our competitor and they used to be our competitor. We do submit competing bids, but then the Navy will award one package of ships to them and another package to us. We end up with something like 40 percent of the work on the bids they win, while they get a similar quantity of work on the bids we get. So at any given time there are a shitload of their people working at our yard and visa-versa. They call it a "teaming agreement." Go figure.

Anyhow, everybody hates to work at that yard because compared to ours it's a junk yard. The pits. A shithole. Plus, we have to park at our yard and take a shuttle bus back and forth. That adds about 10 minutes to the commute going home. They have a couple of piers - - actually they're not even piers, they're old barges moored together and anchored in the river. Also a pretty big floating drydock and a bunch of tower cranes. But their main building is a huge old brick structure that looks like a gigantic sweat shop left over from the early days of the industrial revolution. And for the rest it's a hodge-podge of shipping containers, quonset huts, prefabs, and piles of junk that look like the whole thing washed up on shore from some tsunami. But you get used to anything over time. And the atmosphere is pretty slack there, so long as you watch out for their safety inspectors, who're a bunch of assholes.

So, I'm back working for Dean. If you've been taking notes, you might recall that Dean kicked me off the job he was working at this same yard last November because I wouldn't kow-tow to his gofer/lapdog Myron, who had just graduated from the apprenticeship program and been promoted to supervisor, and who threw a tantrum over it. So I was pretty surprised when they sent me back over there to work for Dean. But when I got there Dean acted as if nothing had ever happened. I did overhear part of a phone conversation between him and Myron, however, which I think was about me, with Dean telling the excited Myron that he wouldn't have to deal with me, or something like that.

Anyway, to give what credit is due, although Dean kicked me out before, he apparently didn't rat me out to the higher ups, because I never heard any more about it. So now things are back to the same old same old. They're bouncing me around from job to job. Last week I was installing some foundations to mount new controller boxes in the engine rooms when the ship cut off hot work there because they were draining fuel or something. So they put me on another job for a few days. Monday they told me hot work had been cut back on, but they didn't want me to go back to that job, they wanted me to do something else. Never said anything about rounding up and securing the parts for the engine room job. So later on, when I or someone else goes back to that job the stuff will be missing. And it turns out the job they put me on is the same one that caused me to get kicked off the job on the other ship. I've been thinking of asking Dean what I've got to do to get kicked off this job.

We had another heart attack victim last week. A 62-year-old Filipino rigger on night shift had a heart attack while working last Friday night. They called the rescue squad who tried CPR but they could not revive him. Yesterday somebody posted an obit in the time clock shack. It said he was survived by, among others, his mother and his fiancee.