Confined Corner will be a place where I can share my experiences in Industrial Maintenance. I have not been in the trade long and certainly not had the title long. Let’s review my history. I am performing maintenance at a plant with a few other crew members today, but this is far from where I started my journey.
Out of School
The first thing I did after I graduated was move away to a small town and got on at a mine running articulated haul trucks overnight. It was an okay job, considering it paid well for the city and where I grew up. The schedule could have been better, and the coworkers were okay, but it was something better than service work as I am not a people person. Everything went great until the industry was downturned, and I got laid off.
After the layoff
Once I got laid off, I really didn’t have much to do, so I went job hunting. I didn’t get anything for a couple of months, and then another mine a couple of towns away had a job fair. I went and did an on-the-spot interview. It didn’t go well; it was my second job out of school, and I needed to figure out what I was doing. A few weeks passed, and they sent me an offer letter, which I accepted.
I am now a helper at the wash plant. I had never done any work like this; to make it worse, it was a swing shift. It was going well within the first couple of months of working. I met some cool guys and learned some stuff, and it felt good. I moved up the ladder and started working in other plant areas, helping with the dryers and the heavy equipment. I hit a big break when the maintenance crew let me start helping with repairs; it gave me a new perspective on what I wanted to do with my future career.
After getting the taste of maintenance, I felt like I had an itch that I needed to scratch, so I saved up some money and bought my first set of tools. The tools were nothing fancy like Snap-on or Mac, but they did the job. That was the first time I ever went to Harbor Freight; it was $400 well spent. I got myself a set of wrenches, sockets, and some other stuff I don’t even remember, but I got started.
Job hunting again
After about a year of working there, with all the new responsibilities but no pay change, not to mention the swing shift, I started looking for a new job again. I was looking and looking, and then I got a notification I had an interview. I was interviewed for the dryer operator position. During that interview, they bumped my pay big time, about eight dollars an hour more than I was making for the same job I already had minus the swing shift. So yeah, I took it and ran with it. I have climbed the ladder through all the dryer operator positions to supervisor. But that didn’t last long. I still was not a people person with people skills; I was demoted back down to just below the supervisor, but I was okay with that. I didn’t have all the stress that came with that role anymore, and it was great just being able to chill for a bit.
That itch came back. By this time in my career, I had collected many more tools than before and was doing a lot of the plant maintenance myself without calling the maintenance crew out. It was great. I was living a dream where I could trade the terrible grunt work for repair work because it benefited the crew with production numbers and downtime, not having to call and wait for maintenance to show up and try to fix the issues.
The holy grail
Not really it was honestly a big setup in my career goals that scared the shit out of me for the first couple of months. Hell, sometimes I still feel like an imposter. I am officially a maintenance guy at the plant, and it feels nice not doing the same things repeatedly, day in and day out. Since moving to this role, I have learned a lot of new things and taught a lot of things to other people. I have met some intelligent guys, gals, and some stubborn ones.
Conclusion.
Before I fully end this, I would like to thank everyone who has helped me and taught me the things I know today. Without them, I would probably not be as far in life as I am now.
I hope this website will be a safe place to share knowledge and help other people find their place in the trades. Expect a ton of future posts from this site, and there may be a face to it in the future.
Always remember that no job is worth getting hurt or killed, and it’s okay to say no and refuse to do a job.