Vent: The one day we got four jobs done by lunch and I still had time to fix the tire on my truck
So last Tuesday we were supposed to do a tube replacement on a small boiler in Gary, Indiana, and the foreman figured it would eat the whole shift. We get there and the whole top row of tubes slid out like butter because the unit had been down for two days and was still warm, which almost never happens. We knocked that out in three hours, then did a quick baffle swap on a water heater, then a leak check on a little steam unit, and by 11:30 we were eating sandwiches in the truck. I even swung by the tire shop and got my rear driver side patched for 20 bucks before the end of the day. Has anyone else had a string of jobs go suspiciously smooth like that, and did it worry you a little?
Back in 2019 we had a day like that at the BP refinery in Whiting. Three of us got sent to pull a burner assembly, and the bolts came off so clean we were done in forty minutes. Foreman didn't believe us, so he sent us to check a valve that had been on the list for weeks, and that took ten minutes. We spent the rest of the shift sitting in the break trailer playing cards. I kept waiting for something to blow up or leak because a day like that usually means you are due for a bad one. Sure enough, two days later a job went sideways and we were there until midnight.