Written yesterday 4/3/07
This has been a very interesting day. I’m starting to get a feel for what my life could be like over the course of the next few years. Today I am up in Lavonia, Georgia, at a company called Carry-On Trailer Corporation. They make pretty much anything you could think of hitching up to the back of your vehicle to carry stuff around in. It’s really quite a fascinating process. First the welders put the frame of the trailer together. Then it gets washed and painted. The painting process is especially interesting because the suspended trailer gets pulled into the dip tank area where it is partially dipped into an enormous tank containing paint. Then the dip tank operator coats the rest of the trailer with a spray paint gun. From there the trailer is pulled along the assembly line into the drying chamber. After it comes out of the drying chamber, they wire it, put axles on it, and slap tires and tail-lights on it. Then they stack them up and ship them out! It’s pretty cool to see. Today we were doing some health and safety monitoring. We put some monitors on the workers that would monitor the level of noise that they are exposed to throughout the day. We also tested for other chemicals and particles that might be inhaled by a typical worker. Unfortunately our equipment supplier did not include all the necessary equipment for us, so, we had to have our receptionist in Atlanta go and buy some of the monitoring badges that we needed and drive them all the way up here to Lavonia. So instead of being able to do all the monitoring with the morning shift as we had planned, I ended up having to stay here to monitor the second shift as well. My co-worker went back with the receptionist as she had to be somewhere else tomorrow. I don’t envy her in the least! So here I sit, typing this out and wondering if I will have the energy to drive home tonight. Let’s see: I’ve been up since 5:30, I’m going to leave here around 10:15 … I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to see.
