Another day of work

Yesterday we spent our afternoon continuing with the inventory of one of the electrical milvans on station.  It appears that any work in regards to maintaining its inventory has not been done since 2011, so we have been tasked this winter with inventorying four milvans to get them back on track.  So far we have successfully updated the Unistrut milvan, and currently we are working on the electrical breakers milvan.

My coworkers Steve (left) and Brett (right...obviously).  They make inventorying much more fun.

Inventorying the milvans is a real headache if I am to be honest with you.  We are reliant upon, usually, guessing at part numbers to try to search the items in Maximo.  Often times, the part numbers are not attached to the descriptions in the database.  This is likely because these parts are incredibly old, and Maximo has been in the USAP only since early 2015.  Back during my first season, we had Mapcon as the inventory database.  Luckily some old archives of Mapcon are still around as occasionally we can only find these milvan parts in those spreadsheets.  Otherwise, I have to try my best to type a description search into Maximo.  The way things are described in the system are not always the most uniform, but we can get pretty close.

My goofy coworkers help make the process much more entertaining.  Lately this entertainment has been at my expense, such as yesterday when Brett decided to use the word "helo" instead of "hotel" when spelling out his part numbers.  What does helo sound a lot like?  Try kilo.  Yep.  A young Sterling Archer we have here ("'M' as in 'Mancy'").

The milvans are located outside.  We could try to inventory out in the cold, but it isn't conducive and we wouldn't have access to the computers.  Instead, Brett and Steve have been pulling items off of shelves in the milvan and bringing them into the cargo office for us to inventory.  This way we all stay warm and can enjoy some of the perks that the cargo office provides us - hot chocolate, coffee, and all sorts of snacks.

Other perks of this work involve just generally being outside!  There was a smoky looking aurora out over the station yesterday.  To my eyes it was pretty uninteresting, but my camera picked up the vivid greens.  Unfortunately those photos are embarrassingly shaky as I did not use a tripod to photograph the aurora.  I'll have to practice that skill a little bit more :)  The moon was also out in full blast, lighting the way for us so we don't have to use those pesky headlamps.

Although I did learn towards the end of the day yesterday that I am still a bit blind in the dark...

When we have to use the bathroom while out at cargo, it requires us to walk back to the elevated station or to the power plant bathroom.  As I mentioned yesterday, I drink a ton of water.  As you can gather, I needed to use the bathroom.  My lovely coworker Steve told me to not fall in a snowdrift and pee my pants on the way back to the station to use the bathroom.  I opted to do the walk without a headlamp at first, but quickly I walked into a snowbank, falling over, and, luckily enough, not peeing my pants.  I turned around, went back into cargo to grab my headlamp, and faced all of my coworkers while covered from head to toe in snow.  Now that's a whole different version of a walk of shame.