Having the hoistroom removed from the shaft means that the hoist man does not feel the hoist. When operating 2 Hoist, you feel it. It’s right there. You feel the clutch engage. You hear it. The volume mounts, the floor shutters and vibrates, the headframe sways ever so slightly. It’s like driving a car; you get instant feedback for everything you do. Not so 3 Hoist, when it was atop 2 Shaft, not so when it was moved to the administration building when they were commissioning 4 Hoist to sit beside it. You couldn’t feel what was happening with 3 or 4 Hoist. You had to rely on cameras and electronic readouts. You had to trust your instruments. It could be eerily silent in there. Okay, it’s not silent in there. There’s a perpetual hum of electronics that slips into a state of white noise, and there are bells and buzzings and hoist signals, but they all fade into the background. And then there are the moments when all is quiet. The bells cease. The chirps and rings and buzzings cease. And everything is quiet. The silence is loud in comparison.
If only they all worked. 2 Hoist worked. 3 Hoist worked. 4 Hoist did not. It was new. It had bugs. Many of the sensors were installed wrong. The skips would get lost in the shaft. You could see them on camera, and watch them inch past the loading pockets, but the loading pockets would not detect the presence of the skips, so the hoist would send an alert, and we’d have to try to place them while in manual. Sometimes it worked straight off, sometimes it took twenty or thirty tries before the loading pocket magnets found the skip magnets.
And the main cage would trip when leaving certain stations, requiring hoist overrides. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And I was training on it. And I had only been given two short weeks to learn it. Keep in mind that it can take some people months to learn a new hoist. I’d only just been licensed on 2 Hoist, a friction hoist, a simple beast compared to the double drum. I did not have to rebalance when skipping from different horizons, I didn’t have to worry about rope stretch.
What I did have to worry about was that the hoist was full of bugs. Its hard enough to learn when everything works perfectly, its harder still to learn it when you have to separate what the rules and laws were when it was working fine and what to do when it wasn’t (and those fixes were not covered in the rules, not written in the procedures, sometimes not entirely legal, either), and keep them separate so as not to be confused when writing the test.
Closing in on the date I was to be handed off to the trainer for licensing, I thought I was going to have a stroke. I was on night shift, trying to memorize the double drum section of the Green Book, monitoring the skips that were “tripping on magnets,” and having to rescue the cage tender every time he tripped leaving the levels the cage always tripped on, bouncing between the hoist stations, all the while listening for his calls on the radio between alarms. It was distracting. It was harrowing. It was exhausting. More than once, Joe had to roll his chair over from 3 Hoist to assist me on one station or another.
Then, my exhausted mind lifted. It opened up. It felt like someone poured cool water over my mind. I was dizzy. I was on the tip of vertigo. I literally thought I was having a stroke. Joe told me to step back from the hoist for a while and relax. Thank god 3 Shaft worked like a charm, with never a hiccup, otherwise we’d never have been able to keep things going.
Then Joe handed me off to Marc and within the week I wrote my second test in so many months and I was expected to run that nightmare, hiccups and trips and all. But by then I was accustomed to it. I’d seen just about every fuck-up it could dish out, and I’d weathered them all. By-passes and moments of manual manipulation had become old hat. The millwrights and electricians continued to crawl over the hoist and the stations and the loading pockets and were beginning to root out the mistakes made by the shaft sinkers, righting the misaligned magnets, realigning the wrongly installed sensors, and little by little, it began to do what it was supposed to do.
And just when it came to pass that I’d be able to put my feet up and let Otto do the work (our nickname for Automatic…Auto…Otto…get it?), my temporary full time shifter, John Cayen (we went through a lot of shift bosses on our crew—Sly Beaupre, Joe Joliet, Doug Maki, Craig Watson, Marc ?, John Cayen, and then very soon we’d have Marcel Ouimette) asked me if I’d like to became the Spare Shift Boss for the crew.
I didn’t think on it that long, having made up my mind in an instant, but I did ask, “Why me?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, but, I’ve been working my way down the seniority list, asking everyone in turn, and so far, everyone has turned me down. Nobody is interested. You’re last on the list.”
“That’s quite a vote of confidence in my qualifications,” I joked.
John laughed. “Actually, I think you’d be good at it,” he said, “but I had go down the seniority list. Do you want it?”
Joe sat looking on, his gaze bouncing between John and me.
“Sure,” I said.
After John left, Joe asked me, “Why do you want to do that? You just passed all your hoists.”
“Think about it,” I said. “How many shifters have we had over the last few years. Some were good, some not so good. John’s one of the good ones, but he’s only temporary. Think about it; who, or what will we get next.”
So, I was about be become a spare supervisor.
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