Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Jul 13, 2006
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days that all these memories come flooding back to me.
The Bird
During one of the times I spent on the oil construction sites I found myself working as a sub contracted welding inspector on one of the highland sites up north. We were building what was one of the largest structures ever built at that time; in fact I believe it still holds the record. It was built in what we called the graving dock; this was a very large dry dock which could be flooded on completion of the build to float the structure out to sea. It was so large that it took you twenty minutes to walk the length of it along the scaffolding path ways and even being built on its side the high end was twice the height of the Houses of Parliament. On a clear day I could see my home town from the highest point of the structure and that was over seventy miles away by road. Mind you, it was a lot shorter if you went across the Firth by boat - that would more than half the distance.
There were two lifts that took us to the top of the jacket, stopping off at varies levels along the way, and these lifts were working twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The work force was on a three shift system so work never stopped regardless of the weather. I believe there was only one occasion where we were pulled off the jacket and that was during a really bad storm which tore the protection sheeting off from all the scaffolding and threw the walk boards around like they were match sticks. Some of the actual scaffolding, itself, was blown down and we could hear it strike the main braces of the jacket that night as they came crashing down from above. We were working inside the actual braces checking the welds on the stiffeners inside. The main braces were around thirty feet in diameter so there was plenty of room for us to get around inside.
We were the only people working that night during the storm as we had plenty of work inside the structure to catch up with. The fact that there were only six of us inspectors to keep up with all the production work of around eighty welders meant we were always busy trying to catch up. It was a common ploy for the welding supervisors to sneak quietly into the outer office and fill the request log with a lot of work just before the shift ended. This would then make us look bad in the eyes of the inspectors coming on the next shift, as they would think that we had left all that work for them to do. We managed to counter this however by monitoring the jobs and keeping tabs on the ones that were almost completed so, in fact, we had already visually inspected the work even before they requested it.
Our office was only a small hut with an outer office which had a counter where the supervisors used to come and fill in the request log for work to be inspected or tested on completion or to have fit-ups checked prior to welding. They were none too happy about this at times as they always thought of us as a necessary evil, yet when it came to having welds and sections signed off as clear by the client, they were only too happy to see us. Like I mentioned earlier most of us inspectors were sub contractors, but there was one who was a full time employee of the company who always considered himself a cut above us. I will call him Dave for the purpose of this story. The fact that we got more money as well as subsistence for living away from home really used to bother him, so there was always a bit of banter going on between us. Most of the supervisors were sub contractors as well and they used to wind this bloke up quite a lot when they came into the office to fill in the inspection request log.
Now one day during our day shift, Dave was making his way back to the office with a carton of chips which he had just bought from the canteen. He was rushing to get in from the rain at the time, when a seagull came swooping down from nowhere and grabbed the chips from his hand. This really scared him as he came rushing into the office and looked petrified as he told us what had happened. He went on to explain that he had a natural fear of birds already and this incident had a really bad effect on him. This gave one of the welding supervisors an idea which he put into motion a couple of days later during another storm. He had found a very large sea gull that had collided with the jacket in the high winds and fallen to the ground with a broken neck. He took this bird into the office, where he crept quietly into the outer office and laid the bird out across the counter with its full wing span and propped its head up with a forked stick. Once he had set it all up and gathered a crowd to watch the proceedings he made a scuffling noise and ran out of the office.
Dave jumped to his feet and ran through to the outer office thinking he was going to catch one of the supervisors loading the request book as we called it, only to come face to face with this massive bird laid out right in front of him on the counter. The look on his face was priceless to say the least, the fear, shock and total panic that had overcome him, left him frozen to the spot. It took him a long time to get over that, let alone the embarrassment of it happening in front of all the staff that had gathered to witness it all. I think the estimation he previously had of us subcontractors, which was already low, took a further dive. He did, however, get his revenge on the supervisor some time later, but that is a totally different story.
