Way to bury the lead, dude. FOCUS: What sort of places have you been behind the scenes? Work at, etc? I worked as a volunteer at the 2000 MLB All-star game. First job was for the Legends suite, helping former players get checked into their hotel so they didn't have to go through the regular desk - brief encounters with a bunch of former players, now "legends." Second job was as a mascot escort. All the teams had their mascot there, so I got to hang under the stadium between the lockers rooms and chat with some of the current players, coaches and ESPN anchors that were on hand. Also, most of the mascot guys and gals are hilariously funny - they can't talk in costume, but in the locker room? funny and raunchy. Last job was helping carry the huge mother of an American flag out on the field (Turner Field, Atlanta) for the National Anthem. If you like baseball and the All-star game comes to your city, I highly recommend applying as a volunteer. It was awesome.
Your friend must be of sound mind. I know one controller and he says the pay is incredible but the stress of the job can eat your soul. And how: you play chess with thousands of people's lives and can not even ONCE say "oops".
Yeah, it was fucking awesome. We were doing a big charity event at GM Place, and Sarah McLachlan (who was on our label), Eric Clapton, Celine Dion, Bonnie Raitt, Bryan Adams, and others, were performing. We were using the dressing rooms as the green rooms for the artists. We were walking down the hall when my buddy's wife hits me and says, "that's eric fucking clapton". Sure enough, walking towards us in blue jeans, blue t-shirt, and scruffy beard, was Eric Fucking Claptop. He smiles, and says, "hello", and we chat him up a bit. He invited us into his room, and he's got a rack of guitars sitting there. I start eyeballing them (been a guitar player for years), and he asks if I play. I say, "yes". "Grab one and give it a shot". So I picked out one of his strats, his guitar tech hands it to me, and plugs me into a little practice amp. I then start noodling around, playing the absolute worst I ever have, and he grabs one and joins in. We then start jamming for about 10 minutes. He stops and said, "thanks for the warmup... I have to go do my pre-show ritual". (That's code for "take a dump"). My friends and I left, spellbound. Was way better than the time I went golfing with Rush. (Geddy and Alex got too stoned to play beyond the 3rd hole).
I think no matter what, most dudes are going to be fascinated with large machinery. Like as a grown ass man, I still catch myself watching staring at large construction equipment. Like if it was a Saturday and a dude was like "Hey, wanna see how this big ass crane works?" I'd have to have a reason to say no. I went into a custom printing facility thinking it was going to be dumb as hell. Big printers, so what? Then I started seeing these things churn out work, all the little pieces, all the technology and I was like "yup, this is cool as fuck." These guys had a printer that was so smooth and still, it could lay ink on top of a bowl of water without shaking the bowl. It literally printed on water. That's some cool fucking shit.
We filmed a documentary on Lilith Fair at the Molson Canadian Amphitheatre in Toronto over two nights. Because it was over two nights, the artists had to wear the exact same clothes each night so they could edit shit together easier. Well, after her first performance, Jewel split the ass in her tight leather pants, so when she came back to the green room we got a seamstress in to fix them. She was some 90 year-old Ukranian woman, or something similar, and basically said, "take off pants". I was working on a laptop at the only big table in the room, and the seamstress put her box of implements down right beside me, so Jewel came over and dropped trou not 5' from where I was sitting. She was wearing little white panties with a yellow bow, and we proceeded to make idle chit-chat about the show, etc., while Olga mended the pants. 5 minutes later Jewel was back in them, and giving them a yoga-inspired stress test. Well, it made my day.
If you want to stop production at just about any shop, you just need to bring in a crane and start hoisting stuff. Tools down boys, they're lifting stuff! One of the coolest things I saw at a construction site was two guys in track hoes digging a hole together. They were on opposite sides of the hole and in each other's swing radius's exactly 180 degree's apart (one was digging, while one dumped). I watched them for 15 minutes and they didn't stop or get out of rhythm. Somebody once told me heavy equipment operators have one of the highest job satisfaction levels. I work in the manure treatment side of confined operations (Hog/Dairy). Most of the places I've been to are clean. It's a bit of a double edged sword, you want to reduce your cull rates, so you bring all the animals together and put them in a bio-secure area with mandatory shower in/out procedures. Now the animals begin to lose their immunity to diseases because they're not exposed them any more, and something gets in the barn and wipes them out. So the farmers make sure they don't let something take hold and start killing off the animals.
Nope... all on simple computers. Not a board or little plastic plane in sight. Every controller had their face in a screen and a phone glued to their ear. I never lost that fascination with huge machines too. The highlight of a miserable summer job was getting to operate this gigantic front-end loader with a bucket as tall as I am or an afternoon. I distinctly remember first seeing it working in a park as a little kid and had been practically dreaming about running it since I got the job. Sitting in the cab I felt 15 feet off the ground. You could pick up and move a metric ton of shit with the flick of a finger, just effortlessly. It was awesome. My employer prints and mails nearly 10,000,000 documents a month. We have automatic document inserting machines that you load with printed flat sheets and envelopes, and it spits out stuffed and stamped envelopes at a rate of 10,000 per hour. Oh, and every document is optically scanned and tracked in order. The machines would fill up your entire living room and have an insane amount of tiny little parts that work in perfect orchestration (most of the time). An amazing machine. To me the ultimate big machine is a 5-axis CNC milling/lathe like this: I start giggling like a little kid when I see them running. It's incredible how fast they will do operations that would take me HOURS with a manual knee mill and with mind-blowing precision.
My first job out of college was a purchasing assistant for a book manufacturer. I loved it. To this day I'd prefer a job in manufacturing just to see how things work. They gave me a tour when I started so I understood exactly what I was ordering and it was interesting seeing how it all came together. Plus I got all the free books I wanted. Although I had to laugh when this older worker was explaining to me how bad it was to smell the fumes from this big vat of chemicals and then proceeded to stick his arm in it to stir it. We left and my boss was like "yeah, don't ever do that."
Working in the consulting/engineering field, I've been in, out, and around any number of landfills and abandoned factories. Some of the coolest facilities I've checked out were power generating stations. As part of the particular tasks we were conducting, we required access to every part of the facility, and would spend days inspecting very square inch of the stations. Many of the larger generating stations, even those that run on oil or natural gas, use some very old, incredibly large pieces of equipment. Bolts 3 to 5 feet long, steel half a foot thick, turbines 50 feet long. The scale of some of the older boilers is amazing. A few years ago, a friend of mine who is an actor out in LA (he's "that guy" who has small parts in many tv shows, and tons of commercials, but isn't a known name) was dating an actress/dancer who had a background part in a Broadway show (Mamma Mia). My wife and I went to one of the shows to see her, and afterwards she brought us backstage and gave us a short tour. It was interesting, but the funniest part was when she let us leave through the stage door out back. We walked out of the door, and flashbulbs started going off, as fans hanging around to get pictures of the actors assumed we were two more people from the show leaving for the night. Somewhere someone has shown these pictures to friends and commented "I never did find out who those two were, but I have their picture!"
I do IT at a surface coal mine, and the large machines are indeed fascinating to watch, even at 33 years old. Particularly a machine called a dragline, which is bigger than any machine you've seen in person. It just digs all day with a very very large bucket. The bucket on ours is 84 cubic yards, and is a medium sized one. Seeing the machine built just about from scratch on site, then take its first steps was amazing. I mean that literally, it walks around.
Mills and lathes are incredible. I've just learned how to use them in the last couple years in school and its terrifying what they do to metal, you can turn a solid block of steel into dust like its nothing. Their precision and power is mind-blowing. And it's just WONDERFUL when a fly-cutter flings a white-hot metal coil down the front of your shirt. It feels like you're getting branded. I know how to do crane signals and if you want good pay for not-so-hard construction work, try being a signaller. But you have to have full attention at all times so you don't, you know, kill people.
I was stationed on an aircraft carrier for a few years and learned all kinds of things about the aircraft we had to damn near everything about the ship itself. It still blows my mind to think how engineers designed and built something like that since almost everything is connected in some form or fashion. I also worked for Gulfstream at the main production facility down in Savannah, GA. They would assemble G450 and G550 aircraft then roll them into our department. We were the first crew to actually put power to the jets and then we would have to troubleshoot all of the systems to make sure it was good for engine runs. It was an interesting job for sure and I definitely learned a lot having hands on time with the jets daily.
I am going to try and find pictures, but I believe it was the worlds largest crane. It came in on something like 40 tandem flat deck trailers. There were 100ton cranes putting this thing together, it was just fucking massive.
I've spent hours on my balcony watching this thing. If I was smart, I would've set up a camera when they started and taken a daily photo as they progressed.
The company I work for supplies equipment that is used on oil rigs. In addition to designing the equipment, I get to service it on rigs all over the world. While the ships and platforms are very impressive, I got to do some work at the Hyundai shipyard in South Korea where some of the drill ships are built. Pictures really don't do it justice. They build large container ships and oil drilling ships there. The ships are built in sections. Each one of the sections floats. They drop each section into a 'lock' or part of the harbor they can flood and drain at will. They float the pieces together, brace them up underwater, drain the lock, and weld it all together. It is amazing how quick they can do it, think hours rather than days or weeks. I got to see the shop where some of the engines are built. They are literally big enough to walk inside of. You really have to see it in person to appreciate it. The largest crane I saw on that trip was rated to 1600 tons. Converted to pounds, that doesn't even seem like a real number. Also, a guy I used to work with was part of the crew that did the analysis on the Deepwater Horizon after it went down. It was VERY interesting to hear about some of the findings from the front line.
A few years ago I got to be an extra on a very big Bollywood film starring Shahrukh Khan (basically the Indian Brad Pitt). They took about 10 of us on a bus to the outskirts of Mumbai, where the "studio" was a giant tent made of a bamboo frame and hundreds of tarps. From the outside it looked like a giant slum-factory, but once you walked inside it was a perfect replica of the interior of a money printing factory. They took us through make-up and gave us suits, so we could play Western bankers in a heist sequence. I played a banker cowering in the background of an action scene while Sharukh Khan (playing a cop) beat up a bunch of bad guys. The process of Bollywood movie making was fascinating to watch. They would start by bringing in white American guys (with their faces painted brown) wearing the same clothes as the actors, then the director would run through all the shots and set the lighting with the brown-faced-white guys playing the parts. Once they got the lighting they bring in the the actual actors to film the scene. Also, much like Hollywood, everyone involved was a struggling actor. We had a young Indian guy whose job was to mind us and stay with us while on set and the whole time he was showing us his resume and handing out headshots. There was also a crew of young American and Russian actors than went from one Bollywood film to the next as extras. They were all hoping to make it big, but the pay was so bad a lot of them had to go from movie to movie just to eat from the complimentary food trailer. In total I spent 13 hours on set, acted in the background of a single scene that lasted about 8 seconds and got paid the equivalent of $12. Also if you thought Bollywood actors might be more down to earth than their American counterparts you'd be wrong. We were specifically told we were not allowed to speak to, stand close to or look at Sharhrukh Khan.
I farm 1500 acres of corn and soybeans, and I'm also a drainage contractor, specializing in subsurface drainage. It's amazing how much bad information makes it to urban areas given how visible agriculture is to the public these days. Crown, I like you. You seem like an intelligent, reasonable person. But your post about agriculture is probably the most ill informed bullshit I've read in over a year. It's not entirely your fault, you just need to find better sources of information. I'd like to elaborate on some of this stuff, but I'm right in the middle of planting season and my time on here is limited. I'd also be willing to participate in an "Ask a Farmer" thread if you guys would like to have one. But wait until June when I'm not so fucking busy.
I just took a look at my new crop plan from my chemical supplier. We're putting 26-28 oz. per acre of Roundup on our soybeans this year. Just to put that into perspective, an acre is 43,560 square feet, and there are approximately 155,000 soybean plants per acre. As was stated earlier, Roundup breaks down pretty fast, and by the time you harvest it's been gone for months. We only use Roundup every other year otherwise weeds start becoming resistant. A lot of guys are using more alternatives to Roundup (myself including) for that very reason. These chemicals are restricted and highly monitored. Anyone who applies this stuff has to get a Chemical Applicator's License. If you get audited by the USDA and you don't have documentation of what you put on, when, the weather conditions, wind direction and speed, etc., you're in deep shit. Weeds are a big fucking deal, if you don't control them they become a huge problem. Before Roundup ready traits were developed we had to spray for weeds after planting and cultivate everything twice after the crop was up, which burns a shitload of fuel. I spent a lot of my childhood walking bean rows, pulling weeds that the cultivator missed.
If its not the crop treatments, what is it about the food that's making everybody sick? It's not just obesity, that epidemic is now fact but there is a general epidemic of poor health these days that's being attributed to food. If it isn't crop chemicals, why are people getting so sick? Many scientists are saying flat out that life expectancy is going to keep falling because of this problem.