Well, I am happy to say that yesterday was the last day of my summer job.  I worked at the same place as last year, as a "intern" (read: summer help) in the safety department at Titan Wheel.  Basically, I did a lot of filing, auditing, spreadsheeting, etc.  I guess I'll go into a little bit more detail just in case you want to know...

The biggest project I was working on this summer is called the LOTO program.  LOTO, which stands for Lock-Out, Tag-Out, involves using locks and tags on machines so that someone else can't turn the machine on when you are working on it.  Titan Wheel, which, guess what, makes wheels, has tons (literally) of enormous machinery to form, press, punch, paint, etc. different kinds of wheels.  Well, pretty much every machine, if it turned on while someone was working/changing it, would lead to serious injury (that's bad).  

OK, so the LOTO program trains certain people to use lock and tags on a machine to make sure that someone can't accidentally turn it on.  Each person, once trained, gets their own personal lock, and many departments around Titan have cabinets of company locks.  Basically, if a person's one lock isn't enough to lock out all the energy sources on a machine (hydraulic, electrical, pneumatic, gravity, etc.), they are issued the necessary number of locks from these cabinets.

Well, there are probably like 30-40 departments around Titan with these cabinets, most of which have 36 locks (so you're looking at a total of 1000+ locks), and I was put in charge of going around to each of these cabinets and auditing all the locks (as in, I have to put my hands on every lock).  Of course, some of the locks were in use when I came around the first time, and the second time, and the third time...  So, I didn't actually finish auditing (and fixing all problems) until yesterday.  

Of course there were other things that I did:   Like sign off on people's awareness test sheets.  Each employee, yearly, has to take these 24 tests to make sure they are aware of how to be safe.  I probably went through a few hundred of these bundles, and signed all 24 pages in each (So, I was getting close to 10,000 signatures...)  Or like typing up a spreadsheet containing sleeve/glove records.  That spreadsheet crossed the 4000 row mark (so I had to type data into about 40,000 cells).

Last summer, doing much of the same stuff, it was mostly drudgery...  This summer, because I was more familiar with the different areas (and how they worked), I kept more busy (less time waiting for something to do), and I wasn't in the (somewhat stressful) process of applying to seminary and moving out, work wasn't nearly as bad.  Also, this summer has absolutely flown by!   I went to Mass each day at 6:30 AM, worked till 4:00 PM, did Spanish (and wasted time on the computer) till 10:00 PM and repeated.  I know, it sounds really boring, but that doesn't account for weekends.  Just about every weekend I did something fun.  Vacation, launched (and lost) rockets, base-ball games, camping, boating, visiting family - you get the picture.  Just about every minute of my summer something was happening - there wasn't time to be bored.  

I certainly will be enjoying the next week of (more laid back) summer vacation, but what can I say, this summer has been amazing - even with having to work each day.  Of course, the problem with not having any time means I haven't been running much.  That could be a problem because I am the sports dude at Bruté this year and probably I'll need to be in decent shape...  Ah well, I guess I have a week.