April 10th, 1998

Hey People,
Well, I guess it's been a while since I clued you all in on life on the
rock, huh?  Sorry bout that. *grin* Life...*shrug* so it goes.  A big
chunk of my recent free time was spent rebuilding my homepage...the old
site was just bothering the hell out of me...like any 'town' it grew
without forthought or good planning, thus was full of ghettos and slums
and basically SUCKED.  Long loading monstrosity is what it was and may
it rest in peace.  Hope the new site is easier for people to move around
in,,,,*shrug* doubtful but we can hope, yes? *giggles*

The rest of my free time was spent trying to figure out what day it
was...I had a HELL of time switching back over from nights to
days...first time.  Normally I make the transition rather smoothly but
not this last time...

Well, the weather here has been just spiffy these past days...warm,
sunny, yep, I kid you not.  (hey, it's just ALASKA, not the NORTH POLE
*giggles*)  which has helped to put people in a good mood...not so sure
about this 'sun' thing...havent seen too much of that this year.  Not
because it hasn't been out (it has, A LOT) just that I've been on night
shift or in the freezers (or both) most of the time...

Well, these past two days at the factory have been hellish.  Gotta start
back a ways so you'll know what the fuck I"m talking about....

Okay, we've been doing herring, yes? remember that?  The only part of
the herring we want is the eggs.  To make the eggs firmer and more to
the Japanese liking we first freeze all the herring and store it for
some days/weeks in the freezer, THEN thaw it out again (called
'fluffing') and remove and process the eggs.  Okay then, I don't know
all the ins and outs and politics behind it but during the freezing
process we take some samples from each code/boat/area so we and the
buyers will have an idea of of the roe (eggs) content and the quality of
the roe.  (the 'average' is around 12% females with eggs but has been as
high as 18% and as low as 6% depending....)  We pull out a 50 pound box
of herring per ton or two as 'samples'.  A code will have anywhere from
6 to 30 sample boxes.  Well, about half way through  processing Sitka
herring one of our buyers called up and said he didn't trust us (not ME
or ANYONE in particular, just ICICLE in general) and wanted to take his
own samples...so, needless to say, we stopped pulling samples for him
and only pulled some for our information and the other buyers.  Of
course he was in Japan when this decision was made, and, well, the fish
just aren't gonna wait for him, ya know? So we went on and finished
Sitka, and then Ka Shakes, and then yesterday he shows up and wants to
take his samples.  *sigh*  Remember me telling you about the freezers
and how I was filling them full of totes of herring?  Well, they're full
now *grin* out of 12 holdings 10 and a half of them are FULL!  The
upstairs is PLUGGED as is most of the downstairs.  All but a very few
codes are more or less hopelessly burried and there just isn't enough
room/time/tools/or manpower to dig out EVERYTHING in a cost effective
manner, soooo.......I got a crew together bundled up in freezer suits
and together with the buyer and his flunky I took them into my little
world he hee heeee.  They were so clueless about just about everything,
god! *giggles*  Okay, the crew:  Ernesto, from Mexico, half deaf and
only speaks a few words of english,  Arvin, Fillipino, way cool, with an
entirely differant thick accent, Jamilla, from Yamin...(Yaminese?? Saudi
Arabia), another deliciously thick accent.  Becky, from somewhere in the
mid west, anyone seen Fargo??  The two Japanese buyers, Suzuki (who
can't say his 'L's and 'R's to save his life no matter HOW hard he
tries--and he really does try too, but his accent is VERY thick) and his
assistant (who's name I never learned and he doesn't speak a word of
english) and me...he hee heee, wow, NICE SOUNDS!!   Needless to say,
'what?' and 'huh?' were said a lot *giggles*  Okay, so, here's what us
bozo's have been doing the past two days:  We'd take empty 50# boxes
into the freezer with us, climb up the wall of totes crawl across the
top of the totes on our hands and knees (or, in a few of the holdings,
our bellies) untill we got to the codes they wanted to take samples
from, pop open the tote,  scoop fifty pounds of herring out of it into
the box (herring are about like a sardine, very SMALL fish, so it takes
a lot to make fifty pounds, but not so small that you can get an actual
HANDFULL or anything so convinient as that) and then drag/slide/carry
the full box back to the doorway and the outside world in that hunched
over hands and knees/belly crawling fasion (and of course you cant just
slide the bloody box all the way because the totes have flaps across the
top that make an unslideable bump and they aren't all the exact same
hight because of various pallet thicknesses or what not, and there are
gaps between the stacks and so forth) and the REALLY nifty part is that
all the coolent pipes that run across the cieling are covered with a
foot thick layer of frost, so every time you brush against them (often
in such close quarters) a nice buckets worth of snow showers down on
you, down your neck and in your shoes and pockets and whatever else it
can find it's way into *grin*  Before we began this little project
Jamillia and Becky and Judy and Abel and others (boss types) were
discussing how we were going to go about doing this and who would do
what and so on...they'd had to do this before some years ago and were
recalling various things "...remember we did this..." kinda stuff.  Soon
as we all stepped into that mysterious frozen realm though, they all
turned to me with the '...okay Torb, where do we go?  What do we do?'
look, which was the smartest thing any of them coulda done at the time
*giggles*  Some people wanted to work down the list of codes in order,
some people wanted to do more than one code at once, somepeople wanted
to find some tool that would just magically make the job easier...once
we hit the freezer though I put a stop to all that. *grin*  All things
considered it went very smoothly and we got it done much faster than
anyone anticipated.  I'm rather proud of that part...not that we got the
job Done, of course we'll get it done, but that we did it so quickly and
smoothly *grin*  (god I'm Good! he hee heee)  Thank god it's over
though, my knees are killing me!  I don't do the crawl around on the top
of frozen totes thing well, I really don't want to make a habit of THAT
*grin*  We all let Suzuki know that we really didn't like doing this
very much, and since he was there doing it with us he had to agree that
it really sucked a lot, so he (or rather his company) is buying us pizza
and beer tonight, *grin* which I need to shower and get dressed for,
sooooooo

I'll see you all later

"...it is a miracle, this rare device, a sunny pleasure dome, with caves
of ice..."

Torbjon