Day 34: ???

It was probably my best day at Brycon so far today. This is pretty surprising considering it was not particularly comical. I started out the morning in the all too familiar pass-through. We started another box of tile, and I told Cowboy to look outside. After viewing the vast expanses of pallets of tile lining the diminutive wall space, he told us, “no more tiles.” That left us with nothing but odd jobs and careful, precise – in other words, slow – cleaning of primary beams and carts. The day moved puzzlingly quickly, despite the lack of work.

At first break, I talked a lot with Thomas. What started out as mostly basketball talk from the game tonight before turned into some talk about college. I found out that Thomas dropped out of college because of some alcohol problems. He regrets not finishing college a lot, and said it was good that I was planning on sticking through four years or more. After break, I returned to the pass-through. We were given a box of probably 250 screws or so. Needless to say, we thought it prudent to carefully clean each one separately. This occupied most of the second block of work. Cowboy asked Josefina if there were any other words for cowboy in Spanish. Apparently, he was bored of us calling him “Vaquero.” She started spouting off synonyms of the word “cow,” I think. She said “Toro,” and I correctly guessed that meant “bull.” With impeccable timing, Gerard walked in. Josefina exclaimed, “Si, Toro!” and Gerard gave a really funny face that happened to remind me of a bull. That provided a nice chuckle. Gerrard came to lead us to a special sprung tent where we were going to have a pizza party. Yes!

We left for the pizza party at about 11:15 and didn’t get back until about 12:30. It was great. There was plenty of food, drinks, and time to sit down. A lot of people that I could have sworn didn’t work with us were there. One unlikely guest was George, a guy who works with Aerotek. I didn’t go talk to him, because he would just ask me if I had found anyone to replace my group of friends that got hired. After a long break, we went back to work.

I revisited the pass-through, but was quickly booted out by Alex. She needed my help in the other pass-through to push filters. I happily obliged; it didn’t feel like a betrayal because it was still a pass-through. But the truth is that things run quite differently in the west-side pass-through. Ron is a resident there, and that changes the entire atmosphere of the place. I guess they needed the filters quick, because Alex went berserker-general on us. She was ordering everyone around, including Gerard, who was working along side the rest of us. We moved an entire truckload of filters, (25 pallets or so) which I assume is quite an accomplishment due to the fact that Alex felt perfectly fine letting all of us leave several minutes early. The flurry was fun because it kept me occupied, I got to work with Gerard, (who is really fun and easy to talk to) and it all felt kind of sneaky because we were breaking nearly all the protocol rules in the book. If a protocol guy had seen us in the pass-through or taken a particle count, we would have been shutdown mighty quick. We remained unknown the entire afternoon, however, and I walked outside into the bright, shining sunlight – so blissful after long hours in the cold, barren clean room – and waited for my mom to pick me up. As I walked up to my white Toyota Previa, I managed to hear one of my favorite workers, Quincy AKA Chin-up guy, provide a perfect capstone to my day.

Quote of the Day:

“It’s sunshine boys; we made it!”
-Quincy

Ron’s Trash Talk of the Day:

(After I told him I was going to try to get my dad to come play basketball on Tuesday)

“Good! I need to light him up.”
-Ron