Day 8 : Father Bob and Payday

                It has been 10 days since I left Vancouver for the great white north up here in Kitimat and I must say, “I miss home!” On the day of my leaving I was scrambling to grab so many things to get ready for camp that I didn’t really get the chance to stop and think about some of the things I might want up here that they don’t have. For example, although this project is worth billions of dollars we cannot seem to dish out the little bit extra for some proper toilet paper. And you may be thinking sure I deal with that at work and so on, but have you ever dealt with it at home and for all your toilet paper needs for a straight period of time. Not to mention that the food here makes for even more frequent trips to the bathroom. I also would like a pillow that didn’t feel like it was stuffed with the toilet paper we just discussed. But most of all I miss home and the people that comes with it. I miss my dog, I miss my family, I miss Gamestars, and I miss my friends. As replacements I have made a camp family; standing at the head I have Father Bob who is another foreman up here for the mason’s and has taken me under his wing showing me the ins and outs of life at KMP; I have a camp sister, Sara, who I eat every meal with and is probably my best friend I have made up here; I have several camp brothers who look out for me and go too town with me when we tire of camp food; I even have a creepy camp uncle who is just straight up a creepy dude all the time, but he likes to eat his meals in close proximity to me and Sara. After dinner is usually alone time, unless there is a hockey game on, which means I go to the gym and back to my room. Now usually at home I would spend my week nights before bed going on reddit, but in camp we have a very strained internet service and find it more frustrating than entertaining to go on the internet. Luckily I find solace in the two terabytes of movies and TV shows that I have procured completely legally. Anyways, enough of what I miss and my attempts at filling the voids; today is Thursday, which at KMP means we all got paid today. To me this doesn’t really mean much to me besides the fact that my bank account now looks a little healthier. Though for the other people here it means out to town and get plastered and whatever else they decide to partake in. And this sucks because as I made clear in my last post the walls of an Atco are not exactly the Great Wall and that makes for some loud noises just before midnight, if you don’t badge back into camp by midnight you are not allowed to work the next day until ten am, but such is the life of a camp worker. I leave you tonight with a picture from one of the over two hundred shitters on site and the message boards within.

                                                                                                For ever yours, Tanner ( Miss you )

Day 8 : Assquake Roommate

A few posts ago I wrote about the people I work with and how essentially it was like they had gathered all the class clowns and loudmouths and put them all in one place. Well this statement rings even more true for the lunchroom. To give a little background the lunch room is essentially three big Atco trailers, like the one I am living in, that have been designed to serve as a cafeteria minus the food services and just fridges to keep your lunch in. In the middle there are six sections of table for people to sit and eat their lunch at. So like any normal person would I went and grabbed my lunch and decided to just sit down at a table and start eating but like everything else at camp this is not so easy because although this chair and place at the table may have seem unoccupied the people nearby informed me that it was just the opposite. So I picked up my lunch and looked for another spot, luckily one opened up next to my crew. I decided to voice my incident to my fellow workers and learned that the seat I so ‘rudely’ tried to assume was none other than Jerry’s and that only members of the operating engineers could sit at that section of table. I found this kind of weird and decided to press further and ask if this was some kind of site rule or just some lunch room bully shenanigans. Well apparently my crew members and the rest of the people at this side of the lunch room have handed over their Cojones. They said that because they have no red seal trade that they were a lesser people than the rest of the lunch room; it truly was a defeated people. At that moment it dawned on me this lunch room was like a microcosm of high school and the operators were the cool kids who got the best seat in the cafeteria; the ironworkers were the cool sporty kids that spent lunch in the gym; the welders, electricians, and millwrights were those fringe cool kids that still went to all the parties but never made that tight-knit group of populars; the carpenters, masons, and roofers were the stoner kids, the first-aid attendants and field engineers were the smart kids every cheated off but no one liked; and my labourers were the un-cool kids that no one cared about unless they thought they might come and shoot up the school, too soon? Although I would like to tell you I gave the boys an empowering speech that go down in history as a truly pivotal moment in trade relations I did not pull a Braveheart. But I did feel like they needed to know that just because our group was not as well educated or skilled in the building trades we play a crucial role in the building of our projects and that this was project was a team effort and we play a big part in that, and I meant it. On a less serious note I now have a roommate to share my bathroom with and now what it’s like to live next to a bathroom stall. You see, the thing about living in an Atco is that to try and make the most of the space they may have sacrificed the thickness, and in turn noise detention, of the walls. So sitting at my desk which is located next to the wall of my bathroom I have heard my new roomy drop one twice just while typing up this entry, and camp food does not make for necessarily solid or quite release of chocolate hostage; kind of throws off the typing a bit. Well I have a big pour of epoxy to handle tomorrow and still have to hit up the gym so this will be all for today.

                                                                                                                                Eat Fresh, Tanner (Labourer Braveheart)

Day 7 : Santa and a Sign

                Well it has been four days since my last entry and many may contribute it to the weekend but there are no weekends here only work and work has finally began. Now coming from the coast and the civil construction industry work for me is none stop; get this done well and as fast as we can. Another thing is when there is no work we don’t come in or we go to another job. Things are different at KMP because every day you come to work whether or not there may be work for you and your crew and the pace at which you do each job would have you out on your ass after your first day if you were back home. Now for me this adaptation hasn't happened as quickly as others so I get assigned tasks I get one a job that should have taken me all day and it’s done by first coffee break. Same goes for when I assign tasks; some of the boys have gone to calling me ‘Masta Tanna’ because apparently I am a slave driver. So as you would guess this leaves us with a lot of time of which we have no assigned tasks and I have no more tasks for the day to hand out. This all brings us to walking. In the last four since my last blog post I decided to download a pedometer to count the number of steps I had taken and I have gone an average of eleven kilometers per day; all while wearing steel toes a big vest and carrying a tool belt. Now you might be wondering at this point if work through a forest and up a trail but I get right to morning meeting point by bus and there is not a tree on site. Yes the site is just that massive. The total working area is just over eight square kilometers; each pot line, the buildings where they smelt the alumina into aluminum is each over 1 km in distance and to get around all the active work you sometimes have to go all around because another trade may be working in that area or maybe there is even a crane hoisting an entire building above of you. So when people ask me what I do for work I don’t tell them I do construction I’m going to tell them that I walk. So when I come home at the end of the day and want nothing more than to lie in my bed and fall asleep you can understand why. But there’s eating to be done and with eating comes my new favorite pastime, people watching. There is a crew of about five friends I have now at camp and when we all get together we are a horrible bunch. But boy is it funny and the new fodder the camp provides for our critique never seems to disappoint. As an example on Saturday a lot of the camp goes to town and buys they themselves some booze. Well we were all in the dining hall having some ice cream dessert and coffee when in comes Santa Clause and he looked like someone may spiked the cookies and milk. So as Santa comes trotting in he starts to veer to his right when ‘BAM’ right into a sign. Santa and the sign go everywhere and although you don’t really want to laugh at some old guy going down, you cannot help but laugh and we are killing ourselves. So in runs security and tries to help him up but Santa tells them to go pound sand and that he just there for some pie. It was a fantastic moment. It’s the little things like this that keeps you going every day, well that and the money.

                                                                                                                Peace out, Tanner( Can’t spell Kitaimat right)

Day 3 : Running in the Rain

    I don't really like admitting it but i'm kind of a stubborn person, I don't like to admit that I am wrong and I sort of have this 'I'm better than you' complex going on inside. Well if people from Kitamat tell you that weather can change fast and that the change is usually rain... They aren't lying, take it from a guy knows. So after leaving this morning for a run it was slightly raining. By the time I had got to the bridge into the town of Kitamat I could have won the spring break wet t-shirt contest hands down. Nevertheless I had an awesome time. Breakfast was the same as yesterday, eggs and salsa with oatmeal and nice hot cup of black. I figured I need a nice hearty breakfast for my first day into actual site...... Oh wait! I still have to sit in a classroom for yet another orientation. Though, I must say, this one did start with some charming Australian people. Side note I have come to realize Kitamat is a lot like a ski town it has a lot of Aussie's working in it but instead of working for the locals like in a ski town, the locals work for them. Anyways back to the classroom. After the Aussie's had a chance to speak about the same thing that we had just heard the day before. We had the wonderful privilege to watch this wonderful film on hazardous materials from the beginning of film and better yet it was a whole hour long and just kept you on the edge of your chair. This was followed by yet another orientation and the thing with orientations is that you have to be exciting and quick on your feet well still delivering the necessary information. If you can't manage this and you are constantly reading from the slides you are going to lose control. These grown men and women that you have sitting in the classroom aren't exactly the most well behaved bunch in the world. A good example would be if you took that one kid from your grade school class that could not never stay still and was always be disruptive and striving for attention. Now imagine if we took them from schools all over the world and put the all in one room. And now just put the cherry on the cake we add the fact the none of these kids respect this person, there job or the information that they are trying to give you. Seems like hell doesn't it. Now don't get me wrong I don't enjoy being there and I don't like hearing there info over and over again but its this lady's job and its not easy, I have been there. Any who this girl we had this morning was only a month in and she had obviously not been studying this orientation so a complete loss of control. Old man asking for her phone number, others leaving there room number for her but mostly just chatting to one another and in complete disregard that there was even a presentation going on. After a couple painful hours we were told that we would soon be leaving to meet our bosses and take a site tour. Well that was just a plain lie; I had enough time to go back to camp grab some stuff from my room and another bag of lunch then continue to wait for two hours. When we finally caught our bus into site, it was the first time you could fully appreciate the magnitude of the operation. The site is massive there were machines and buildings everywhere. People were suspended hundreds of feet in the air. And yet despite the enormity of the operations no one seemed panicked or cramped, well besides the warehouse guys at the tools and gear shed; they were very busy. On our tour of the site we got to all around the site which includes Pot Line A which is the nearest building to completion. Inside building A is know classified as an iP Zone which means that inside there is intellectual property that we have signed off not to disclose to the public and other companies. Basically meaning no pictures and phones. Which sucks because it was quite the sight. Aluminium is made using a process called the Hall-Heroult process which basically means they take the raw alumina, which comes in a powdered form, and apply massive amounts of electricity to it, like 360000 volts, and turn it into molten aluminum. Very cool stuff, if you want info you can take this link right here. So after tucking away my cool construction stuff boner and finishing our site tour we sat around for another two hours, apparently we do that lots here, and went back to camp where I sit here now typing to you and listening to Van Morrison. And on the note I think i'm going to take a Moondance down to the rec hall for a veggies and dip.                              
                                                      Peace Out, Tanner (I wish I had purposely spelled grammar wrong)

My Room

Day 2 : Paperwork and a Friend

    5 Am is a strange time for my at KMP; on one hand people from night shift are still hanging out playing ping pong and laughing in the rec area and on the other a guy that drank himself to sleep only five or six hours ago. For me it was day one of a new beginning, I put on the running shoes and went for a half an hour shower around camp, then I took another one with less clothes and warm water. My next en devour was Breakfast a wonderful meal even if it can't manage to hold a stick to the Lunch and Dinner. Oatmeal, Denver eggs covered in salsa and a piping hot cup of make me poop. The food was excellent but it wasn't even the best part of my sit down. I made my first friend here in camp! I guess my amusing banter and approachable demeanor naturally attracted some one to sit down and share their meal and thoughts on the exciting day (insert sarcasm here) with me. But wait I have one more surprise... Out of the 1700 in Atco city about two percent of them are female and one happened to find me, given I am pretty fly for a white guy. Apparently I looked like I knew no one and might need a friend. So I have my first camp friend, her name is Sara and she is from Maple Ridge and unlike the most girls here she is in trades. Well this makes my whole day a lot better because orientation day is never an exciting day. So after a lovely bus trip through the busy town of Kitamat we arrived at our destination, Kitamat Valley Institute (KVI from here on out). Now if your never been to a job orientation for a large construction project you may be thinking it will be just a few fly over shots of the project and little blip about the company values and guidelines. Well your close just switch little blip with excruciatingly boring and repetitive. No joke, if you have insomnia, I have the cure; If you ever wanted to be bald but are afraid of barbers, this will make you pull out your hair. It was 9 hours of safety from videos narrated by the lady from Microsoft Office speech to talk.I know your probably thinking i'm exaggerating, and maybe I am, but it is horrible I think I would rather work than this.... After visiting hell we took the bus bake to town and me Sara had some dinner, ribs and salad for me and chili and salad for her. Now up to this point I had only eaten with Sara once before and had not really taken notice of what she had been eating. Turns out the looks I was getting from her well eating were not ones of advancement but rather ones a vegetarian makes well watching a man scarf down three racks of ribs. Oops. Never the less we had a good time and discussed being vegetarian and our movie collections. Usually at this point I would retire to my room and watch a movie and type to this blog, well that's what happened last night anyways. But tonight I was going to see my buddy Steve that I know through Mtg ( look it up if your that curious but your going to be disappointed). Around eight Steve came by and we walked around, talked, and he showed me the KMP tricks and ropes. During our excursion I got the great pleasure in meeting Father John KMP's resident speaker of knowledge, crazy stories and jokes that might have jumped the border into racism. This man is the reason I keep coming back to construction, not the rampant racism, but the crazy stories and grand variety of characters you can only find in the world of construction. We get people from every walk of life. Whether they come from across the globe, in town or just down on the coast. They might be here to help pay for a better life for there kids or just want a jacked up truck. These are the people behind the scenes that people look down on because they didn't go to university maybe not never even finished high school. They are good people and bad people but they make it so you can have your internet and drive a metal box down the road. They are building our world and damn do they have cool stories.
                                                                                        Tanner, Bad at Grammer

An Introduction and Disclaimer

    "Smaller than I thought, but the bed looks nice." These were the thoughts that first went through my head once entering my new home for the next 20 days. Wonderfully equipped with a sink, bed, TV, desk and shared bathroom; imagine you had to fit four hotel rooms into one standard room. But enough about my room and more about it's occupant. My name is Tanner Aronson and i'm from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada though my current residence is in lovely Kitamat, BC at the Kitamat Modernization Project for Rio Tinto Alcan. I decided that because I am going to soon have a lot of alone time and probably am going to be doing and seeing some things that your average person might not see, why not be so ten years ago and blog about it. Also my friend Jeff says that I should make a blog about my antics because it would make people laugh, wither it be at me, with me, or at others. Lastly I should explain what exactly an Atco is for those of you to lazy to google it. An Atco is a construction trailer built on either and wooden and steel frame or an aluminium one. To begin with each trailer is just a barren shell of wood and aluminum, until they are given a purpose in life; in this case my Atco and other hundreds up here have been suited to be living accommodations capable of holding 2000 plus workers. We have a full dining room, two gyms, rec area's, a pub and a lot of rooms exactly like mine. Tomorrow I will post a picture from a far to see the true immensity of this project. Finally we have come to end to my introduction and by now you may have noticed that there are several grammatical errors. This is due to me being bad at writing so unfortunately your just going to have to suck it up and cringe through my pathetic attempt at the english language. 

                                                                                           Tata for now, Tanner