Wow, OK, thank you very much to the good people who left a comment on my last post. Tonight's another quiet night aboard (thank you God), and I was able to go for a walk ashore this afternoon, too. Good day. I go home in a few days, though just for a week.
All of New York decided to go for a walk around Brooklyn Bridge Park, which shares an entrance with the container terminal/lay berth piers where the HQ is docked while we wait for a berth to open up at the tank farm where our next job will start. This meant that on my walk, the sidewalks were so congested that it wasn't possible to stay in step for more than 15 seconds at a time (not exaggerating) and I spent much of my walk winding my way around people. The smell of weed and foreigners (B.O.) lay thick enough that it wasn't possible to forget about it... and the side streets were little better, so my walk wasn't all that enjoyable, but all the same, it's still better than walking in circles around deck ad nauseum, so there's that.
The past 5 weeks have been pretty good overall. We're still dealing with solidified oil in our tanks that will not pump off, and more building with every job, and it now takes compressed air being blasted into the pipelines to clear a path for oil to flow within our pipelines... the problems of ow temperatures and oil that is stupid to use in cold locales, oil with very high pour points (the temperature below which the oil stops flowing) haven't been addressed, but I have finally stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb, as my spirit animal Dr. Strangelove recommended. The office folks don't care. Should I?
It's been hard, detaching my ego, sense of pride, the desire to do things well and correctly and my work ethic, too, from how I do my job. If nobody gives a fuck that the oil we're carrying is a nightmare, that the receivers hate it and hate us because of it, and every job leaves less and less room in our tanks as residues build, why should I? So long as I can keep it out of the water and go home with 10 fingers and 10 toes, I'm still doing the job to the best of my ability. Agonizing over the fact that no matter what I do I can't do my job correctly enough to have the satisfaction of a cargo completed is exhausting, so I try not to dwell on it, and I have stopped apologizing to the victims receivers. Ships that are regular visitors to NY are already avoiding the supplier of the problem oil, so I figure that this problem solves itself.
And it has been slower. Thank God for that. With time in between jobs, since everything takes longer than it should, and since part of the time we have to return oil to the supplier because we literally can't get our pumps to pump it (which means returning the oil by loading MORE of it, heated higher, then pumping it off and reloading it, which leaves an inch or three of new cold oil bottoms on top of the oil that was already there), and try to get it to the next ship before it turns solid again.
So, yeah, the pace is more reasonable than it has been. it's like things were up until COVID. We have free time every week, sometimes just a half-day, sometimes more, but I have been at this company for 15 years, and for the first 12 years THIS was the pace. Optimum for sustainability in terms of our equipment, mental health and well-being too. Going non-stop is hard on the metal and hard on the meat. Actually its made me realize how much I hate my job now compared to just 3 years ago, because this past month I actually enjoyed the work a couple of times. Splicing a damaged mooring line the other night, it was cold and quiet and the ocean was calm enough to reflect the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Really pretty moment. Shit like that is worth it's weight in gold.
I'm still trying to figure out what happened, in that I've been working on the water for, wow, 42 years. I started at age 8, and I've always loved it, and then I didn't, and then I was trying to avoid thinking about it because I hated it so much that I stopped looking out at the ocean, stopped taking enjoyment of the little things that made shoreside work so unpalatable in comparison... I'm hopeful that I have again found a place to hang my hat in terms of justifying being a mariner. Time will tell I guess. This past month has shown me that there's still a lot of good things attached to my work for me. I hope it keeps going.
2 comments:
Good to hear the problems with the crappy fuel oil have backed off a bit. I'd never thought of it turning solid in the tanks, but then the ships I worked on burned "#2 Marine Diesel".
Hey, I missed getting in other batch of comments.
Understand the stress of continuing, but I do appreciate all your effort to now. I'm in sw Ohio, nearest anything maritime is coal barges on the Ohio river, so you're showing me a different world.
At least hang on for awhile for when you move into expatriate status with your new home and IHFW.
Far as work frustrations...yeah. There are some things you can fix. Some you can't, even with much extra effort. Getting stressed about the latter will affect the former, to no good end.
Another thing I remember when working with an old highway patrol sergeant, "if you cain't help the incident, clear the scene." Used that advice much in later years.
Do what you can do, and be happy with it.
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