...and back on board

 I got back onto the HQ about 2 hours ago. 

   So, I had a good week away. I absolutely didn't expect that. 

           I was pretty annoyed at getting ganked (pulled off the HQ, sent to a different bunker barge), and a green-as-baby-shit tankerman put to keep my seat warm. 

  Truth is, normally they need just one senior tankerman aboard. B, Big E and I are all very senior, and there is always 2 of us here under normal circumstances. This lets the company give us fucked up weird cargo orders and sensitive jobs to do, as everyone needs to sleep sometime, and when oddball things pop up, the senior guy has to get his ass up and ride herd on the junior during complex operations and that's fine... unless it's a daily thing. A (presumably) older adult can only operate at 100% for so long on days of badly broken sleep. Thus, we get the odd jobs... but also by choice, as the upside of having so many jobs not be straightforward, we have a deep reserve of talent aboard, and our individual strengths vary, so the calming presence and exacting detail guy (B), the deep seamanship and operational knowledge guy (me), and the can-do guy who keeps the shoreside support people from hating us (Big E) together all combined makes for a very efficient workplace. The fact that all of us are close friends now also has a deep impact on our workplace and our ability to sustain good performance even as life intrudes, as it will and does. 

  So, yeah, I'm happy to be back on the HQ. 

       Having a trainee aboard is a massive pet peeve of mine. I absolutely DO. NOT. LIKE. having a trainee. It's been 7-8 years since the last time, when B and I made it clear we weren't willing to train for all the bribes in the world. Being alone a lot is a MASSIVE job perk here, and is in the top 5 reasons why I stay here rather than sail internationally, which I prefer. 

 I love the solitude I get. Deeply. Having a trainee aboard on the bunker barge I was working on is brutal, spacewise. The quarters are tiny, smaller than the HQ, as they have a single large bunkroom aboard and the galley is very narrow. Big head (bathroom), though. Pretty posh.  That meant that when I was off watch, the trainee would come in after I was asleep to go to bed himself in the shared bunkroom. 

   To my good fortune and his credit, the trainee  didn't snore, didn't talk in his sleep, didn't fart too much, and basically was a good roommate. I'd never sleep through him coming and going, as my bunk obviously was next to the door, where I could be up and out in seconds. 

...and... with all that,  it was a good week. The trainee was a sponge, asked great questions, was motivated to learn, and was good company, with that blessed but rare gift of discreet discernment, where he knew without me hinting that it was a good time for quiet here and there. We could sit in comfortable silence, which is an unusual social skill in my opinion, but deeply welcome. 

 Plus, the barge was 2 weeks out of the shipyard wherein it had had a major maintenance period. Mechanically it was perfect, the quarters were freshly painted in a tasteful way and the decks were overlaid with an epoxy floor that was well-applied and colored in speckles that had a pleasant black, blue, white and gray mix.  Very comfortable, if teeny. 

   So, here I am, back to where I want to be if I'm gonna be at work. 

Perspective

 I need to count my blessings that I have minor things to bitch about like getting ganked onto another assignment, and having no hot water on board

   Yesterday someone 3 miles away blew their oil barge up, one DRT, 2 injured.  

Ganked!

 I'm fine, everything's fine. The small, shitty part of me wants to make a list of everything I don't like right now. 

 Other than having to take a cold shower last night, I'm not gonna make that list. The guy who fucked me over so I had to get ganked off the HQ and run one of her sisters also didn't report that they had a dead water heater, and I was sweaty and dirty enough that I wasn't going to be satisfied taking a birdbath at the sink, so cold shower it was. 

 I haven't done that in a while.  It was unpleasant. My testicles tried to go back in time.

But, I went to bed with a washed ass, so... victory?

 Anyhow we're working on that today. I have a trainee on here so I have him straddling both watches, which gave me a couple of quiet hours this morning, which was lovely. Good kid. Motivated. Has a baby on the way. 

 I'm elbow deep in the day now, anyhow. Focusing on the positives. Trying to, anyhow. 

Still alive, still here

 I'm supposed to go home tomorrow but I agreed to do some OT. The job I agreed to do fell through last minute and I'm left with another job to do, which is a bit of a shit sandwich. 

 I'm not in a writing mood as yet. 

A repoast

 The more you can poke holes in any hypothesis, the more shitty it is. 

   So, you can poke multiple holes in the theory of evolution, and while not as easy, also do the same for the theory of gravity. 

 This does not mean that the base concepts are wrong, but that our understanding is weak, likely not fully accurate, and badly in need of improvement or at least, direct testing. 

Anthropogenic Global Warming is a soap bubble of a hypothesis that absolutely does not yet meet the stringent definition of a theory. 

 Doesn't mean it's wrong, again, but sure as shit doesn't mean it's right, when virtually no aspect of it stands up to examination, and claimed core proofs which can't be tested... which means there's faith involved. 

 Now, being summat religious, I've got faith and I ain't afraid to use it. But that's me. 

    Do you? Proponents of AGW certainly are exercising some degree of faith. For my part, I'm still withholding judgement on the whole thing but I'm open to either possibility.  I've got no beef with people who want to operate on a precautionary principle, so long as the human cost, or cost to humans, is low. So far, with carbon taxes, EPA permitting and Pournelle's Iron Law ruling over the moneychangers involved, it's been ruinously harmful. 

 Separately, the religious aspect of AGW:  it's insane and retarded, a cult of faith-based performative science where the priests are the most prolific profiteers of the movement... which is corruption at its' finest.

  Anyhow, please enjoy the following Historical sermons from the Church of Environmental Scientoady: 

From author/apologist. John C. Wright: 

1. 1958 New York Times: Ice-free Arctic within 70 years.

2. 1967 Salt Lake City Tribute, quoting Paul Ehrlich: Global famine by AD 1975. Involuntary mass sterilization needed to curtail population growth.

3. 1970 Boston Globe, quoting James Lodge: Ice Age by the 21st Century.

4. 1971 Washington Post, quoting NASA: Ice Age within 50 years. 

5. 1972 Brown University: Global climate deterioration due to Global Cooling.

6. 1974 Guardian: Ice Age coming fast.

7. 1974 Time Magazine: New Ice Age.

8. 1978 New York Times: No end in sight to cooling trend.

A year later, the same paper with the same somber urgency, was reporting the opposite.

9. 1979 New York Times: Global climate catastrophe. Ice-free Arctic within 70 years.

10. 1982 New York Times, quoting UN: Environmental catastrophe by AD 2000.

11. 1988 AP: Global Warming: Maldives drowned by rising sealevel within 30 years (AD 2019).

12. 1989 San Jose Mercury, quoting UN: Global Warming: nations drowned AD 2000.

13. 2000 Independent: Snowfalls a ‘thing of the past’ in England within ‘a few years’.

14. 2001 Albuquerque Journal, quoting George Hurt: Climate-change to kill New England maple syrup industry.

15. 2004 Guardian, quoting secret Pentagon report: Climate change will trigger nuclear war, submerge major European cities, Britain ‘Siberian’ by AD 2020.

16. 2006 AP, quoting Al Gore: Greenhouse gas. Point of no return in 10 years (AD 2016).

17. 2007 New York Times, quoting UN: Point of no return by 2012.

18. 2007 Canwest News: Ice-free Arctic by AD 2010 or 2015.

19. 2007 AP, quoting NASA: Ice-free Arctic by AD 2012.

20. 2007 BBC: Ice-free Arctic before AD 2013.

21. 2008 Xinhua (Chinese News), quoting Norwegian official: Ice-free Arctic.

22. 2008 New Scientist Magazine, quoting director National Snow and Ice Data Center: Ice-Free Artic by AD 2008 (that year).

23. 2008 National Geographic, quoting scientist: Ice-Free Artic by AD 2008 (that year).

24. 2008 AP, quoting NASA: Ice-Free Artic by AD 2013 to 2018.

25. 2009 USA Today, quoting Al Gore: Ice-Free Artic by AD 2014.

Note that on or about this time, circa 2010, the Glacial National Park erected signs warning that all glaciers would be melted entirely away by AD 2020

26. 2012 Australian: Snow gone by AD 2020.

27. 2013 Guardian: Ice-Free Artic by 2015, will trigger methane catastrophe.

28. 2017 Sydney Morning Herald: Climate Changes to curtail Australia’s ski industry.

29. 2018 Forbes, quoting Harvard University: Ice-Free Artic by AD 2022. Chance of any permanent ice remaining is “essentially zero.” (Despite these odds, 5.6 million square miles remain.)

30. 2018 Greta Thunberg, autistic schoolgirl, quoting ‘Top Climate Scientist’: Humans to go extinct if Climate Change not fixed by AD 2023. All humanity to perish unless fossil fuel use stopped within five years.

31. 2021 LA Times: No Snow in California by “sooner than you think.”

32. 2022 Bloomberg: End of Snow threatens to upend 76 million American lives.

Please note that in AD 2020, Glacial National Park (see above) removed the signs predicting the glaciers clearly looming above the sightseers were to have had vanished by now.

This is painful

 My employer has started throwing online training videos at us, in the same way spaghetti is thrown at a ceiling. 

 I get it, they get pressured to prove they're improving the retards by the people who hold the hoops that they have to jump through. 

     Of course we all know that if this bullshit was really important, they'd send a real live human to teach it, so... the effort taken is proportional to the effort given, if you understand me. 

     The exception being the annual sexual harassment training videos. 

    So, our industry has a BRUTAL problem with the few women out here getting harassed. No reason to sugarcoat it, it's a real thing, right up to rapes occuring.

    This year the training videos and quizzes and such is about 3x longer than last year's. And it's a shitshow. The sexual harassment part is fine, but they've expanded into microaggressions, marginalized peoples, biases, and a whole bunch of unrelated other issues that utterly detracts from the message of not being scumbags aboard. 

 Microagressions, forsooth.  One of my favorite suoervisors in my early days used to call me 'Dr. Asshole' for being overly educated, and once threatened to masturbate into the deck department's ears so 'You fuckers will hear me coming.'  Dude was beloved. 

 I really do think that the issue of sexual harassment aboard is an actual problem and widespread, based on the shitbags I have had to work with. And call me an asshole but it's easy to get members of certain minority groups fired for pulling this shit, we all have appropriately low expectations for them. But I've also seen a company absolutely marinate themselves in liability, by trying to avoid shitcanning a white guy who absolutely deserved to get his teeth kicked down his throat and thrown over the side.

 So, yeah, I get it, and no matter how retarded the training videos were, at least I didn't have to go through the indignity of an in-person class, as like 90% of things taught online, it has to be understood by the illiterate retards my company keeps hiring, so it's not as though you need to actually pay a lot of attention to get a perfect score... and as much as I dislike computer-based training, when you're doing mindless busywork, at least you don't have to go at the speed of the slowest learner as you would in an in-person class.

    Dr. Asshole, you see, reads enormously fast, which is why my monthly book budget is so high. Unfortunately the training videos force you to work slower and not work at your own pace, which makes me want to hang myself, and REALLY makes it challenging to try to stay positive. They really don't make it easy. It wouldn't matter if I was learning how to judge a blowjob contest, I absolutely can not stand having to wait and listen to narration of someone speaking slower than my rate of comprehension. 'S part of why I can't listen to podcasts. Having to listen to some gink take 45 seconds to explain something that should take 10 is just pure punishment. 

        

...and back again. Anatomy of a crew change.

  TUES AM:  

    Well, it was good to be home. 

  Sitting at my local airport now with a delayed flight to NY. Not an auspicious start to the trip.

    I dun gud, no booze, ate relatively healthy, lost 2lbs while I was home, which is unusual but welcome. Innapropriately Hot Foreign Wife had last week off so we were pretty well welded at the hip for 2 weeks, and that was nice. I have a pleasant light tan after the daily late-morning swims we did. Sadly, a series of particularly strong thunderstorms revealed a roof leak, and the $3000 to get a crew in to undo the fairly widespread damage sure hurt, but the roofing crew is at my house today so at least it's underway and was caught before I got damage inside the house beyond some spongy drywall and water stains. 

    I'm returning to work for August, which is a tough time to be working outside on a hot steel boat with 120-degree oil in the tanks. Gonna be digging deep this tour for sure. 

   My plane is boarding the miracle-seekers now. You know, the 40 people in wheelchairs, 35 of whom will magically regain the use of their legs before we land? Yeah, those trashbags. My love for humanity is at a low ebb when I'm at the airport. 

Wed PM, late:

      It was a bumpy but quick flight. In the end we only landed about 45 mins late. The pilot shoveled in some extra coal I guess. 

         Crew change was pleasantly smooth- Between JFK airport and the office is a BJ's, and I went in and stocked up on bulk items, including water and soda and energy drinks, which I usually store in the company's warehouse before heading to my hotel for the night. I was VERY fortunate in that the HQ was at the dock at the foot of the warehouse, and I humped my bulk stuff aboard and headed to the hotel. My room at the hotel was nice enough, and quiet for New York, but the TV was busted and an LED light liked to flicker on and off every 5-10 minutes, which was odd as it had been switched off but there was no visible plug to undo, so I hung some of my clothes over the light, which helped. The TV thing was no big deal except that I like to watch Youtube videos on that hotel's TV the night before crew change, as I start to adjust my circadian rhythm into work mode. 

    The night before crew change, I usually try to stay up late, until midnight or 1am, and sleep until 6. The short sleep allows me to catch a nap before taking the night watch on Wednesday after I arrive and move in.  When my alarm goes off, I shower, suck down an energy drink, and by then usually my taxi has arrived, where I'll go to a local grocery store and stock up on vegetables and staple items I didn't want to buy in bulk, before heading to the office... as it happens, the HQ left the office dock around 8pm on Tuesday, and went to anchor out by the Statue of Liberty, and I took a launch out to the HQ to relieve B, who was headed home. 

         The launch is owned and operated by the mayor of New York Harbor, Dirk the Dutchman.  Dirk, whom I've wrote about before, is an 82-year old Dutch gentleman who was a merchant seaman and later a New York harbor tug captain for 30-some years, and rather famous in our circles. 

     Forget that terrorist commie Moor mayor in New York. His jihadist schtick mandate ends at the seawall. Dirk's the mayor of the harbor, so it was good to check in and get casually sworn at, as is custom. Me being generally in Dirk's good graces, he usually limits it to 'quit fuckin' around and go on up the ladder' when it's time for me to, well, go up the ladder and onto the HQ. Prior to that though, as I usually do, I talk over the state of things on the harbor while I was at home, and get caught up on gossip and who died, when applicable. 

     After shaking hands with B when we traded places on the HQ (the offgoing guy being on the night watch, E was also there to help and thus no need to do a handoff and arrival conference with B to get me up to date), and casting the launch off, I humped my stuff indoors and started stowing my things and pulling others out of storage as E and I caught up on personal things and he downloaded the details about what's happening, what happened when I was away, and the state of stores, fuel, orders, etc. About 90 mins later I went in my room to make up my bunk and put out my shitty clothes for work, putting away the Good Shoes and my travel clothes before laying down for a nap. 

       Sadly, my nap was only about 2 hours, as the piss taker arrived. 

       Being subject to drug testing, we get randomly hit up to piss in a cup for the edification of the office people and today was our turn. I was sleeping like shit anyhow, up and down, so no big deal. After delivering the goods, I just hung out a while, wandering around and getting a feel for the HQ and doing a more official walkaround with E after the heat of the day passed. 

 And that brings us to tonight, where I am communing with nature, more or less, and passing the time (no orders until tomorrow noon), and getting back into the rhythm. I paid out the 3k for the roof leak at home, which hurt, but nothing I can do about it but cry. As I'm free for the night, I pulled out some ground chicken, and cooked it up with onions, zucchini and tomatoes, and I'll stuff a couple of orange peppers with the mix for dinner. 

    I can't say as I'm joyful to be here, but I'm here and I'm ready to work, and ready to get paid for working.