A Day in the Life

At the request of my Dad I’m doing a “day in the life” piece on this piece! Come with me to my job on the ragged edge of the Red Zone in central Christchurch working on the side of the Pacific Tower.

I usually wake up around 5:00 AM or so. I used to use my cell phone as an alarm clock but I’ve taken to just waking up on time as a habit. I lay in bed half awake until 6:00 AM when I grab my computer and talk to Ellen on Facebook for a few minutes. It’s weird because when we talk one of us is always on the edge of sleep. I’m either waking up or she’s falling asleep. If I catch people on Facebook on Saturday night or so I can often chat with them while they are drunk which is obnoxious but often humorous.

At what I would like to think is 6:30 AM I get up but it ends up being 6:40 more often than not and I end up late. I put on my fluorescent vest, cover alls, and Virginia Tech hoodie and head off to work. Sometimes the windshield is iced over and I have to scrape it just like back home.

On the way to work I hit Barbados Street and cruise down the one-way system into Christchurch. Since I live in St. Albans this is only about a five-minute drive. Why don’t I bike or walk you ask? You try working seven days a week for ten hours a day on the side of a building then tell me you don’t need the extra sleep! Besides, I need my car to sit in while I take my lunch break.

I usually stop in at the BP station on the corner of Barbados and Bealey Ave. to get a coffee on the way to work which puts me in right on time. The guy at the counter says “another flat white then” and I say “yep” and he pours it as I grab a bumper bar for breakfast. Bumper bars are like cliff bars but they taste amazing instead of abysmal. They have oats and dark chocolate with dried apricots. Absolutely amazing to start the day off right.

After I leave the BP station I usually realize that I’m cutting it close so I try to hit the lights green on Barbados until I get to Gloucester St. I take a right and run past Latimer Square. Up until that point it just looks like a regular city. Once you hit Latimer Square everything changes. The first thing you notice is a big gravel and dirt lot on your left. The reason for this is that there used to be buildings in that area. They have all been demolished since the earthquake. I continue down Gloucester until I come up on the Pacific Tower. At that point I turn left into what used to be a hotel. It’s now a big car park for all the construction workers.  I finish off my coffee as I park the mighty oddity with all the other NFM workers. NFM stands for National Facilities Management. None of us can get our heads around that. How does National Facilities Management have anything to do with high ropes specialists? Whatever, I park my car and put on my helmet. I have a yellow helmet with some big safety goggles sitting on the front like something from Rommel’s Afrika Corps. Aside from looking absolutely stunning they help when I bust out the grinder or the hammer drill.

I mosey into the building looking up at the windows to see if the wrapping on them is fluttering in the wind. If it is blowing too hard it can be very hard to get the job done. The job I do requires me to be on a swing stage. This is basically just a big outdoor elevator on the side of the building. We run it up and down with two electric motors attached to cables. For those of you wincing at that thought there are also two additional cables attached to sky locks. These will arrest the swing stage should it suddenly jerk down or exceed a certain speed. They can be very annoying if you’re jumping around a lot.

Upon entering the building I sign in at the front desk. It feels like checking into a hotel that then turns around and makes you work. After signing in I make my way up to the NFM cupboard on level two of the building. There I find my boss who tells me what I will be doing that day. Ninety percent of the time he says I will be on the southeast swing stage. I like it when he says that because it means I know exactly what I will be doing all day. Since I work on that face the majority of the time I have a good idea of what is going on there.

I then suit up for the day. I have a big fall arrest harness that was made by my good friend Lindsay. He owns Aspiring Enterprises in Christchurch. Just as a shameless plug, it is widely regarded that Lindsay makes the best cave suits ever. I’ve worn one in a cave and I will say they’re pretty magical.

After gathering all the materials I need for the day I make my way out to the swing stage and hop on. Me and who ever I am working with will do a jump test to make sure everything is alright then we’ll head up the face to the work area.

My general purpose for being on the side of the building is to repair cracks. Since the earthquake there have been small stress fractures in the building. Our job is to find the cracks and destroy them. That is, fill them in with epoxy resin. The first step in this process is finding the cracks and grinding off all the paint around them. We then drill holes along the crack every 100 mm or so to make sure the resin has a chance to flow freely in the wall. After we use a concrete adhesive called TG to attach injector ports or “nipples” over the holes. Finally we inject resin into the crack. After it has time to set we knock off the nipples and ferring coat over them, prime and get ready for painters to step in to finish them off.

That whole process sounds like it would be rather easy but it takes about a month to get a face done. Since the product we are using was new when we first started working on the south east face, we stuffed it up and have to do it all again. Few people were thrilled about the prospect. Lately I have been going back up the wall between the 4^th and 10^th stage and prepping it for crack injection.

The most annoying thing that can possibly happen is this. You are minding your own business on Halloween just doing the time warp with your flat mate and all of a sudden the ground starts shaking. Then you go into work the next day and find the place you just finished the day before has about two new hairline cracks in it. The entire thing is just completely unfair.

I work from about 7:30 AM until 10:00 AM which is affectionately known in New Zealand as a smoko break. This is the first time in the day I get to see food cart guy. This guy is the best. His prices say he charges $2.90 for a sausage roll but more often than not you’ll walk away with a free drink to go with that. He is an actor but he runs the food cart by day. I told him about Mike’s burgers in Blacksburg VA once and now he has a calling. Every time I see him make a burger he tries to make it bigger and more extravagant than Mike’s. This leaves me with a moral dilemma. I don’t want to tell him he can’t do it but I really want him to keep trying. Once we saw a van roll up behind him that belonged to the city council. We almost rappelled down screaming “death from above” but they weren’t hassling him so we left them alone.

After receiving our food we go to the oddity for a sit and a feed. Usually my buddy Chris comes and hangs out with me. We have fun making fun of our boss and talking about stuff that dumb boys talk about when they don’t have girls to bother them with rational thought. We shoot the shit and talk about dumb boy stuff for a half an hour then hit the stages again.

We work on the edge of the Red Zone, which is very odd. I sometimes look around the side of the building and see the old Cathedral. It’s sad to see it without it’s trademark bell tower sitting all alone in the middle of the Red Zone. A few times a day the red bus makes it’s rounds on the “Beyond the Cordon” tour. This is a trip through the Red Zone. Often we look down and wave as it goes by. People looking up at us always have that look of “are those construction workers waving” like they don’t actually accept that we are real people until we acknowledge them.

The Red Bus riders are not the only disaster tourists we see during the day. Often groups of back packers will walk by our building. Often they will try to pay the parking meter. This behavior is usually met by admonishments from on high as we yell at them not to pay for parking. No one checks the meters in the red zone anyway. Often the tourists are attractive females, which give us something to talk about while we work. Many a time I have sat on the stage injecting talking shit with the other guy there about girls down on the street. Our conversations on the swing stages range to all sorts of different topics, from politics to how bad our socks smell.

The day wears on and at 1:00 PM we get lunch. Often this is a PB&J or something from the food cart. On rare occasions we get belly busters. That means big burgers delivered to us from the center of the Red Zone. None of us have passes so the owner of the cart brings them out to us. Double meat, double cheese, double bacon is the order of the day. Somehow I’m still losing weight… I don’t understand how.

We hang out in the shade then get ready to go back for one last push until 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM. Often the work slows down a little at this point because we haven’t had coffee since breakfast. This will cause any swing stage operator to become lethargic.

Every now and then a rope access guy will drop by and say hi. These are the guys who hang from ropes that are attached to the top of the building. As swing stage operators we are kind of like the bomber pilots of the construction world. The rope access guys are the fighters. They are the coolest construction workers. Often if we meet up with them we’ll offer to let them stand on our swing stage for a bit. Generally we’re all there to help each other out and we all get along real well. They’ll move along and we’ll keep working spinning yarns or listening to the hum and hammer of the drills and grinders that make up our daily routine.

When the day ends we go up to the top of the building to pull up our safety ropes and power cables. This is always the best part of the day because the view is usually very good. From the roof of the building the southern alps are visible along with the port hills and the ocean. Often we sit up there for a little bit and watch the freighters come into Lyttleton harbor. On a sunny day work is truly enjoyable.

Once the cables and ropes are pulled up it’s time to go home. We all come down the building and sign out at the front desk. We all walk out together and get in our last stories or jabs at each other as we go to our respective forms of transport. I get into the oddity and drive home listening to The Sound live at five. This is great because they play two live classic rock songs for my drive home. I usually get home right as they end and hop out of the car.

After that I cook some dinner and shoot the breeze with my flat mates. We watch some TV and I usually talk with Ellen again. This time she is usually just about to pass out on the other end of the line. Sometimes we skype but not often since internet is slow as over here. After that I get a shower and go to bed after doing an ab and core work out. The next day I wake up and do it all again. It’s a simple life but I enjoy it thoroughly. It makes me think about lots of cool things during the day. A few of the other guys read a lot. I still prefer my books on tape but I’m getting back  into reading  over here.

The whole lifestyle is very tiring but I enjoy it very much and I’m learning a lot about construction. It’s comfortable and I’m saving a lot of money for when Ellen comes over in the Autumn.