Chapter 18

Paul’s turn:

Reverting to the old norm this morning. Alarm clock went off, waking me up. I took a bit of time to assess the joys of having a warm female form in bed with me. Barb’s here. My unlikely but all too perfect wife.

The bed’s at the end of a travel trailer, though, and today’s my first day back at work.

It’s WORK work, you know, where you show up at a given location at a specific time and other people expect you to perform functions for which they’ll pay you. THAT kind of work.

I gave my mate a loving squeeze when I rolled out of bed, expecting her to remain there.

Wrong. She got up, stretched, her cotton nightshirt doing inexpressible things to the contours of her lithe body.

“G’mornin’, love,” she said, stepping towards me to wrap me in her arms.

“Good morning, little cutie. I love you. You don’t have to get up with me, you know.”

“I don’t HAVE to. I WANT to. Bathroom. You first, then me. Then coffee and food.”

Okay, this is a decided improvement over the last time I had a real job. Waking up by myself, scarfing down a bowl of cereal, grabbing a travel mug of coffee, and heading out the door without another human contact until I reached the office was the norm then. I could really like this version.

A parting kiss at the door, Barb still in her nightshirt, and I had a definite skip in my gait as I climbed in our truck for the drive to work.

Construction sites are not new to me, since I started at an engineering house after graduation I’d pushed hard to NOT be a cubicle commando. To a great extent, my employer complied, allowing me enough leash to learn the field. I say that to say that when I pulled up to the construction site gate, I wasn’t going into the unknown.

Standard rent-a-cop at the gate, clipboard in hand, pushing 300 pounds, an obvious member of Meal Team Six. My first entry, so he dutifully copied info from my driver’s license, told me to see the site security people for a badge, and gave me instructions on how to reach the construction office trailer.

Nice guy. I thanked him. Of course I’d spotted the office trailer from the highway. Big double-wide ‘manufactured housing’ thing, a line of pickup trucks and golf carts and four wheel ATVs surrounding it. Pretty obvious.

I was early. Others were showing up. I held the door open behind me as I entered, got a “Hey, what’re YOU doing here?!?” from a face I vaguely remembered.

“Sam Greese, right?” I said, offering a hand.

“Yeah, you remembered. You’re Paul SomethingCajun, right?”

“Richard,” I helped. “Here to help.”

“We need help.”

“Here I am. Where’s the coffee pot?” I paused, “and Larry Baden?”

He pointed to a folding table in the far corner of a conference room. We headed that way, Somebody already had a pot started. I noted the bright red-orange package of Community Coffee and said a little prayer of thanksgiving that the coffee was imported from Louisiana. The pot dripping didn’t have color, it had viscosity. At least we had that working in our favor.

“I’m gonna have to cut this cup with hot water. Boudreaux (Auth. Note: pronounced boo-Dro) gets here early and starts a pot. If I drink it straight I can see sounds.”

“Cajun coffee.”

“Whatever.”

“I heard somebody say my name,” I heard a disembodied voice from an open office door. The guy came out, hand already extended. “Jean-Batiste Boudreaux from Pierre Part, Louisiana.” He pronounced it “Zhoan” and Pierre Part is about as Cajun as you can be.

“Paul Richard from Cedar Beach,” I said getting a hearty handshake.

He noted ‘ree-shard’ and grinned. “Good! This place needs more coonasses.” (Auth. Note: ‘coonass’ is a colloquial term for ‘Cajun’. It is acceptable among Cajuns to describe themselves, and when used in a proper context, among non-Cajuns).

Somebody else maintained a similar sentiment because I heard the front door open and a loud voice boomed out “Somebody tell me that blue truck outside brought us a fresh coonass!”

That would be Larry Baden – project manager now, grizzled old engineer I knew from my days in the office back in Louisiana.

“Are you engaging in the abuse of Cajuns again, old man? I still have HR on speed dial.”

He laughed. “Old man?!? You hit YOUR speed dial and I’ll hit mine and see who tattles first!”

“You just couldn’t leave me on the beach, could you?” I chuckled back.

“No. You designed this shit. You get to make it work.”

“It’ll work. Where’s my office?”

“End of the hall on the right. Put your stuff in there, then come to the conference room for a meeting.”

“Great!” I laughed, “Let’s start work by not working.”

“You still got it, buddy!”

The Monday morning staff meeting was as expected: I, as well as two other new arrivals were introduced, there was a discussion of a couple of issues that had arisen and been handled last week, announcement of a few issues showing up this week, all the things you’d expect on a ‘green field’ construction project – ‘green field’ being a term describing a project that starts where no previous facility had existed.

I’m thinking that the last time this field was ‘green’, mammoths had been in the picture, and today most of my electrical infrastructure consisted of a few trenches and concrete slabs. Since we had a competent electrical contractor involved, I decided they didn’t need my eyes staring into a hole in the ground, at least not immediately, so I retired to my office.

New office. Laptop computer – company issue – sitting on a desk, a couple of BIG monitors, a Post-It note on the laptop saying “Call me when you’re ready to set this thing up” with the number of the IT department. Okay, get that out of the way...

Half an hour later I’m done with IT. I turn away from my monitors and grab a stack of drawings, then return to the monitor and start opening files to compare the drawings with the latest iterations on the screen. I got a good twenty minutes of this before a lady stuck her head in my door.

“Good morning. I’m Maria Ramirez, Larry’s admin. He said to give you these keys,” she said, handing me a keyfob. “Green ATV. Has a big number four on the side. Yours.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t see you come in, so I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself.”

She shook her modestly coiffed head. “Oh, a polite one,” she tittered. “It’s a construction site. I’ve been here since they mobilized the site, Larry and I, and construction sites aren’t noted for conforming to the normal manners.”

“Maybe so, but still ... I’m Paul Richard.” I stood and offered a hand, which she politely shook.

“REE-shard. Okay, you’re Cajun...”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And I see the ring. Larry didn’t say you were married.”

“I wasn’t, last time we saw each other. Whole week now.”

“Really? And West Texas is your choice for a honeymoon?”

“We live in a beach house on the Gulf of Mexico. West Texas is positively exotic by comparison.”

“Well, we need to do something social so I can meet her. You DID bring her with you, right?”

“Absolutely. We brought our travel trailer here, set up in a little RV park. She’s spending her days with the owner at that antique store in town.”

“Mimsy’s place?” she chirped.

“Yes, Mimsy’s place.”

“Good to know. I’m a local. I know Mimsy. Her husband’s...”

“Yes, he told me. Civil foreman.”

She smiled. “Well, welcome to Hell.”

“I understand that Hell is over. We’re getting into winter.”

“That’s just Hell 2.0,” she laughed. “Nothing here to stop the wind between us and the North Pole except a barbed wire fence.” And she pronounced it ‘bob war’. Texas. She left. I walked into the common area that served as the conference room, hit the coffee pot for a second cup, this one not quite as strong as the first pot, chatted with a few people, then, keys in hand, went outside, found my wheels and buzzed off to look at the project.

It’s a construction project, still in early stages. The knowing eye would discern that – a few major pieces were in place, the big fractionating tower that was key to the process, structural iron going up, preparatory to receiving a mile of process piping. On one level I’m always amazed at all this, every bit existing on drawings, put there by people who have images in their heads about how things work.

I headed through the apparent (it isn’t) chaos to the site of my future substation. Fresh concrete foundations stood clear of the leveled ground, joined by trenches. I noted a network of the copper conductors of the station grounding grid in place, a team of electricians working on this early part of the process. Other trenches were there as well, banks of conduit in them to receive the cables soon to be part of the power and control systems.

I located the electrical foreman, introduced myself with the promise to actually be useful if he needed explanation of things that might seem unusual in the installation. There shouldn’t be any of those. Electrical power is a conservative field in general, especially outside the substation building we’re expecting.

“It’s supposed to be in on Thursday,” he told me.

“Pretty standard thing for us. Get out of the way and let them set it down. Make sure it’s facing the right direction.”

“Oh, come on,” he laughed. “You’ve seen that?”