So . . I make glass

Aight, here's some o' the digs on work:

First off, Guardian is a good company, and the people I work with in the plant are almost all happy and well-adjusted :-) There's a lot of joking and laughing and friendliness (and yes, bad language, but that's part of the real world). I'm getting my narrow white-collar world shaken up a bit, which is good. There are a lot of people who come home from work sweaty, tired and incredibly dirty, and they make our country run.

As you can see here, the plant is basically a big long warehouse, whose fundamental dimensions are obscured by multitudinous add-ons. The float line goes down the length - from the furnace hoppers dropping batch into the furnace (bottom left) to the cold end guys packing glass and the fork trucks zipping filled racks off to banding, end caps and storage (top rightish). There isn't overhead stuff, so you don't have to wear hard hats, which is really nice. Everybody walks around with steel toed shoes and safety glasses. If you're around anything hot, you wear your mint green jacket (which most people wear around all the time anyway). If you're doing true hot work, you wear a kevlar hood. If you're around breaking glass or loud stuff, you wear earplugs. If you go under the furnace, you wear a hard hat. If you're a slitter or a packer down at the cold end, you wear these big honkin' yellow bibs to protect you from breaking glass, and if the plates you're cutting are taller than your neck, you wear a full face mask. I pretty much walk around all day in steel toes, jeans, my green jacket, safety glasses, and hot work gloves sticking out of my back pocket.

The float glass line consists of a very large furnace, which you can see in this picture. This is the back left cornerish of it. The glowing spot is the edge of the actual furnace, and the gray squarish thing on the left is the intake/exhaust duct. It's hard to see the actual walls of the furnace under all the beams and pipes and cooling ducts and such, but when you find it, it's all white silica bricks, which are about the only thing that will stand the heat (2800 degrees) for the life of the furnace (~7 years). You're usually well-removed from the hot stuff, but you can open ports and look in the furnace, and there are a couple openings into the furnace and the "refiner" - which is a big swimming pool of melted glass. You can look in briefly, while holding a piece of dark glass in front of your eyes, but the heat gets to you. I've never been around such a volume of intense heat before. It's like when you open a hot oven and get blasted with air that makes your ears and forehead tingle...or when you're by one of those campfires that's so hot you sorta hold your hand up in front of your face after awhile. Just more intense.

It's a bit of a rush - walking on the catwalk over the ports on the firing side and feeling the metal of your belt buckle burning at the edge of your jeans. Or wondering if the tips of your ears could actually get burned by the heat of the air as you try to stand and listen like it's no big deal while Bobby explains the batch logs returning with the convective flows from the spring zone. Most people at the hot end have had some (or many) intense experiences with heat, and I'm sure I'll end up with a few of my own. For now, burning some hair at the front of my head is the craziest thing that's happened :-P

My job. As young Russ asked emphatically in The Kid, "But what do I DOOO?"

Well, basically, Guardian pays me to help the process run well/better. Operators, working 12-hour shifts, take care of the hour-by-hour maintenance, monitoring and documentation. They also take care of immediate upsets like batch hitting the wall or the ribbon swinging in the tin bath. The process engineers work a little more long term, thinking like "OK, why do we keep having adhesion chip issues? Where could they be coming from?" Or "How can we vary the batch compositions to speed up our transition to this darker color of glass?" The days are filled with a lot of walking around, hanging around control rooms, talking to people, watching screens, and a bit of desk work. In my three weeks, the process has been running quite stably, so there hasn't been much action. But when stuff hits the fan, things get pretty exciting :-/

Right now, to accomplish that ultimate goal, I am working as hard as I can to learn the basics. Trying to follow people around or track them down to show me stuff, asking every question I can come up with, taking copious notes when I get back to my desk, and trying to eschew laziness and "input myself" as much as possible in what's going on. What I've come to realize is that the process is, with little or no exaggeration, as dynamic, complicated and indecipherable as a human being. People who have worked with it for 30 years learn new things every day. In a way, no one really knows what's going on. Chemical plants are built, and the next 50 years are spent trying to figure out how they work and keep them from breaking down :-)

So yeah, it's a formidible challenge; but folks are looking out for me and planning out my training. It's great when I learn stuff, and even better when I can actually DO things. Last week I learned the raw material end of the process, and this week I was up in the payloader (i.e. front-end loader) hauling rail cars around and driving the dump truck back and forth with 8 tons of cullet (busted glass) in the back. I love it when I can get my jacket dirty. That's a good day of work :-)

Here's a good basic shot of the hot end office, where my desk is. This is looking directly left of the direction I sit. Jay, BT and Brian sit at the three desks in a line there, and Earl--my boss--has his office inside where that big window is. It's a nice little area. There's a central sound system in the whole plant, and when somebody isn't paging somebody, they play the XM radio. Thank You SO MUCH, Lord, for no radio commercials! I seriously think it would mess me up to have radio ads in my head all day every day. You can adjust the volume of the speakers in each office/area, too, which is cool. "Outside" my office, which is still inside the overall warehouseish thing, there's the float line going down, and then lots of little sub-buildings and areas like the QC lab, maintenance shop, store room, more offices, and lots and lots of stacked glass. Overall, it is quite a nice place - pretty clean, well kept, and not full of nasty chemicals or hazardous wastes (which made my co-op plant sort of a pain).

Quite honestly, I couldn't ask for a better job. The people really seem great, across the board, week after week, the location is 20 minutes from home with almost no traffic, every day is different, and I am expected to advance in my career, not just stay in this job forever. I've had a few tastes of doing real work - meaningful things that someone else couldn't do at the moment - and it's invigorating. I'm grateful to have people looking out for me and thinking about my training and learning program. I'm praying and working to do the best job I can and really help Guardian make more, better glass, and God has allowed me to be content and happy with the unchanging 8-hours-a-day schedule and early bed and rising times.

There's a LOT more I could write. I have to keep fighting back details about the process and plant that I'm so impressed with myself for knowing (yes, pride, it's everywhere, even in a know-nothing 3-week-old process engineer trainee). If anybody wants to know how glass is made, or what this common substance is actually like, let me know! :-) I hope to write a post in awhile about glass, and probably another one about "The operator and the engineer", and how you can succeed in life. Yes indeed :-P

Even though it was a hard transition, being in a real job in this field is pretty cool sometimes. Again, I couldn't ask for a better job, and God is wondrously good to have brought me here. May He use the money earned, the career begun, and the eight hours spent every weekday, to His glory and eternal purposes.

--Clear (actually, slightly bluish green from the iron oxide in the glass, which absorbs solar radiation so your car doesn't heat up as much in the sun) Ambassador