Back to work...early

Well, with the woman not coming and after spending the first three days of the week on vacation, I decided to go back to work yesterday. I emailed my boss on Wednesday and asked him if I could come in Thursday and Friday. He said come on in, since we were short staffed anyway with two of us on vacation this week. Boy did I ask for it.

I got in at 7:20 AM on Thursday. No one was where they normally should be at this time. The offices were empty. No one was in the break room having coffee and some others had not arrived yet. So I headed back towards the clean rooms where I see three people talking about what to do next. My boss sees me and tells me that I had better gown up and get in there because we just had a glycol explosion in the room that we were going to be using today for the production run.

For clarification, our machines use a glycol and water mix for a coolant, since the machines run at temperatures of more than 200 degrees Celsius. Obviously at those temperatures, water alone would be useless.

What actually happened was not a glycol explosion but a glycol spillage. Whomever put the new mold into the machine forgot to hook up two of the hoses running to the mold heater. So when yet another person turned on the glycol and heats, the glycol came gushing out of the hose, overflowing the catch basin in seconds and spilling onto the floor. After less than a minute there was about an inch of glycol on the floor, which we had to clean up entirely in order to operate the machine. The person who turns on the heats is not familiar with the machine setup so she did not even look to see that some of the hoses were not connected. Safe to say she'll never make that mistake again.

To top it off, once we had the room cleaned up, which took about an hour with five of us working on it, the parts we ran came out horribly for the better part of the day. No matter what we tried, the problems would not go away - consistently. All in all a lousy day. And to think I volunteered to come in....

Today was only a half day, which was good because most of the staff was out, either sick or on vacation. We don't run anything on Fridays during the summer, so I ended up helping to replace water damaged ceiling tiles for four hours. Again, to think I volunteered to come in.

Fortunately I can use those vacation days later and it's a good thing, too.