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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Richard's account of a typical day

Well, my day start waking up at 5, showering, then heading in to the shop to go eat with friends around 5:30 who work nights, and back in the shop about 5:50. 6 I get my passdown from the night shift production sup on whats going on with specifics in the shop and then also get a passdown on whats going on with every piece of gear in the workcenter. Currently our backlog is just under 60, and I know whats going on with every single piece we have. After I get my passdown I check tools  to make sure nothing is lost or broken or needs to be replaced and sign all of those off. By this time I have 20-30 minutes tog et my coffee and do whatever else I want before everyone days and nights has to go up the ladderwell for quarters where we stand in formation and hear whats going on for the day if anything special is up or if someone screwed up we all get to hear about it. That only lasts for 15 minutes, 20 at max. We all come back to

the shop and days will get things set for what they will be working on and nights gives them a passdown if they didn’t already get it before shift starts and quarters. At 7:30 the whole ship cleans for an hour. After that nights stays around for like 20 minutes extra before leaving to do whatever before bed and days starts workin on whatever gear we have that they took a passdown or I told them they need to work on. Now is where the fun begins. There is a report printed out daily of the status of all of our gear, which includes any parts that are on order. I go through and scrub all of our items for status updates from supply on when n where our parts are coming from, find out why they might take so long and to expidite it or why they get cancelled or if there is any on board somewhere in another shop or even in supply because supply doesn’t update nalcomis properly which is the sytem we use to document n track everything. You can look up a part and it might say theres 0 on board but it will have a location and if you physically go there and have supply check sometimes they do

have one on board. So I get to do supplies job for them also. The average length of my BMT for the shop is 10 pages but sometimes hits 11 pages. If things don’t change much and its not a busy day for me I can get everything done with that in 30-40 minutes. Sometimes its takin me a few hours to do if I have other things I get interrupted with. Yesterday I wasn’t even able to get to it. So far every day I’ve had to deal with getting paperwork filled out for BCMs which is for items that w3e cant fix for one reason or another. Parts being burned up, not being able to get parts, parts not coming in for a year or more, parts being cancelled etc. I do a lot of research for alternates for things we can use if we’re unable to get exactly what we need. I work a lot with Chin who works in supply, and I work a lot with Chief Johnston, and Master Chief Dickinson who both work in PC. Last few days I’ve had to deal with tracking parts that supply

had that they didn’t even know about and I had to go through Supplies Chief and Master chief to be able to pull them out and they got in trouble for not doing their job correctly because I was doing the research they shouldve been to find these parts they should have given us a few weeks ago. There’s quite a few people who know me now because I get stuff done. Our Chief here which is always never around notices a big difference too from the other supervisor that was here before they moved him to another shop. He’s had some questions for me that Ive been able to answer for him right away and also told him thigns I’ve found that he hasn’t, so he doesn’t mess with me to much. Only thing he messes with me about is how the people in my shop are slobs which they are and are getting better, but I don’t know if they’ll get to where he wants them lol I clean up after them quite a bit too. We are severely undermanned in this shop. My

other 2 cruises 1 shift had more then both shifts have out here. So we’re like 30% manned compared to my other cruises. Makes things hard because people have their chow breaks and smoke breaks and gym time n things like that. You can cut it short on them, but you have to manage everything out to be fair. When we’re out here it is to do work so there’s not a lot of play time. Pretty much you work and sleep. I have my CDI stamp out here again so that’s good and lets me sign things off instead of waiting for the LPO to do it now. I’ve finished my quals up to 308 and won’t have to take anymore tests for it. Everything else is just getting the training and signatures then routing it. 301, 301, 303… to 308 you have a test for all of them which I’ve finished now. I have to get up to 313,

and then do my 3m quals 3m301, 302, and 303. Every Tuesday we have drill that goes from an hour and a half to 2 hours and everyone puts into play what they know about damage control if we were ever attacked. It’s a lot of fun I think. It’s like playing pretend back in elementary. A bit more sophisticated ho and a lot of people monitoring and making sure you are doing it right, because if it did happen a lot of lives are at steak and also the ship. I’ve been participating but at different locations tog et some training and sign offs. Last week I was finally assigned to a spot and just followed to learn and yesterday I was actually doing it for real. I had a lot of fun and only had one slight mess up which wasn’t a huge deal at all. I was told I did really well for my first time actually doing it. The qual level for that position is 312, so I’m doing a job I don’t even have my quals for yet lol Whats nice too is that you never really go down either. So from my spot I can go up but they wont really ask me to go to a spot at a lower qual rating. So I jumped ahead of a lot of people. Partly because most people hate

the spot I have. Im an investigator and go out to find whats wrong and report it in on what is going on so they can make the decision who to send in. The whole time I walk around looking for damage or casualties of any sort and try to respond first then go report it if its to much. I have a full setup I wear and it gets really hot, yesterday I actually used the oxygen tank I carry around with me. Every Wed we have training instead of cleaning but that lasts for 2 hours instead of one. Its mostly useless stuff and pointless but its required by the ship to do. Um, other things that I do through the day is just a constant monitor of Nalcomis to see whats goin on, if anything changes or comes in and also keep track of what my people are doing. I work in the largest work center, both in size and the amount of gear we run. We have over 60 setups that we can run gear on and each setup can either run 1 piece of gear or up to 6. Usually I eat after everyone else for lunch and get 20 minutes and for dinner if I do get time to eat I also have about 20 minutes for that too. Shift ends at 7, but I’m generally still getting things finished up by 7:30 or so. Nights runs the gear and generally get more RFIs, but we do more of the tedious stuff. At least I do anyway. My

guys focus on running the gear. The different places I deal with on the ship ranges from the very front, like 4 feet from the front, all the way back aft so I do a lot of walking and go up n down a lot of ladderwells. I try to get to bed about 9:30 so after work I sometime have an hour or hour n a half if things are going smoothly. But there’s meetings I have to attend sometimes for random stuff. I get along with most people out here but there are a few who I butt heads with. I’ve even done what I hated that people did to me. Saying I’m the more Senior ranking and if you don’t like it you can basically screw yourself lol I always try to avoid that and get things resolved calmly but sometimes people just wont listen or don’t care n you just have to remind them whether they like it or not they are in the military and they signed up for it and this is how things work. Quite a bit of the stuff I do is at a First Class level so the people I have to deal with and

the ranks I deal with above me sometimes they just shrug me off, but that’s slowly changing now that they see me more often and the people who have been supporting me. I need to study for this next test to try and make it. Youd be surprised the difference it makes with some people just having the extra chevron. Well, I’d write as little more about out here but in just writing this I’ve fallen a little behind on other stuff I have on my desk right now. Someone from supply called and is asking for us to do some research for him because hes not sure on how to get the answers. So glad I know how to do my job and his…. Love you much and will call again real soon. :) sorry about the typos, fingers are frozen and fingertips are numb hahah

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