Day 9 and 10, November 13;20, 2013

            Now you may be wondering on why I am doing one blog for two days. Well, that answer is that these 2 days were really quiet. On the 13 I came in to work for the first day, to my new set up in a new location. With my luck however, the setup didn't work and I had to wait a couple hours before I got some new equipment. In, the meantime I was tasked with calling several companies to get quotes for parts and building supplies. After that was done, I started my next task, which also took the entirety of the 20, archiving. There is a database of all the pump stations done at Langan on an excel spreadsheet. The only problem is that it is a little out dated. So, I was tasked with updating it which is quite the job since it was missing so much data. In fact even after 2 days of work, I am still not done with by job. This was also the reason why I combined two days for this blog. The archive took up most of my time on the 20.

Day 8, 11/6/2013

         So for this particular day, Mr. Koto came went up to me and offered to take me to an open house being held at a company called Allstate Powervac. And before you ask, it is not a company that offers insurance for vacuum cleaners. It is a company that deals in clean up and repair. I, of course, said yes so that I see more things. A car ride later, I was at the company open house where we were promptly offered free jackets. After which, we went on a tour. The facility wasn't very big but then again it doesn't need to be. Most of the room was used for repairing and cleaning vacuum trucks or parking them. But there was one interesting part. Follow one this. Lets say that you have a sewage pipe that is just destroyed and in terrible condition. This company has a way to fix it. They have a piece of felt that is covered in a certain type of chemical that when heated, will harden. So, they saturate the felt, drive it through the pipe, and heat it with steam and/or water. Once that starts it goes on until it is complete. And there you have a new pipe. Okay, it may not sound as interesting using words as a medium but seeing it was an experience. After that I went back to the office were I ate lunch and got some bad news. Well, bad new relative to an extremely minor problem. I was going to be located at a different desk for all my following weeks. Not a big problem, but hey, I liked that desk. I went to Mr. Raina after and was assigned to do some cost estimates. Then Ko gave me some AutoCad work. I was to count out all the parking spots for a mall parking lot using one of the Langan exclusive features. Then I used a program called AutoDrive. This program lets you "drive" an automobile on a CAD drawing to see if it can make all the turns. A useful tool when designing a mall parking lot. At this point, the day was over and I left.  
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Day 7, 10/30/13

             As usual, I got to work at 8:30 am and did so prep for the job until my mentors were able to get any work for me to do. My waiting did not take to long because at 9:00, Adam Kent comes up to me asks me to go over one of his field reports. Basically, he had some edits written with red pen on the paper and he asked me to write it in. The field report was about a fire flow test that he did on a site. And no, he was not lighting stuff on fire to see how fast the fire burned stuff. Basically, when you have a building about to be opened, you have to check to see if all the fire hydrants are up to snuff. That basically extends to knowing if the pressure in the pump is enough to work in a fire engine. To, check this you have to look at a number of features. First, you turn on a pump and test its water pressure. Then you go down the line and turn on another hydrant. This will allow you to collect a whole number of data points for the water main between the two pumps. First, if you have two pumps on, you will be able to see the pressure drop at the first pump. Then you can calculate numbers like the friction in the pipe, water flow, gallons of water per second in the pipe and so on. After going through this task, I went to another one of my mentors, Mr. Raina, to get another task. Here I learned about a job happening at Stormking high school. The school is on a hill so the waste water and rain water naturally goes down. But, the waste water has to get cleaned first. So, it gets chemically treated with chlorine and otherwise and then detoxified. Afterwards, it sent to one of two rivers. And, in order to keep track of how much water goes through the system, they have several sensors to measure the water flow every 15 minutes. Why 15 minutes? Eh, I was told that it is small enough that you can get a lot of data but not so small that it gets to a crazy amount of data. The problem is that somehow more water is getting into the system from rain water and is causing spikes in the charts. The place wants to see how much of a problem is to see whether or not it should be fixed. Thus, my company was hired to make an excel of how the rain has added to the system, and what the readings would be like without the rain. I can say that during this time, I learned more cool things about excel then I did before. Once, I was done with that, I went back to the pipe thing from last week to make sure everything was done. Afterwards, Adam went back to me with some more work. He had an AutoCad sketch that need to get edited. There were some measurements that had to be read and some charts that had to be added. Overall, it was pretty trivial. At that point, the day was over and I went home.