Mining Games, Part 9

No sooner did I begin training to be a supervisor did I notice that all the engineering mine techs teaching me their respective skills had been hired within the year, or two years prior at the earliest. That perked my interest.

I went to speak with Luc Brousseau in Human Resources. “There was a posting for mine techs two years ago,” he said. I hadn’t seen it, I said. Could I bring my diplomas and transcripts in for their review? “Sure,” he said. “At the very least we’ll have them on file.”

Shouldn’t they already have been on file? They were, but I realized that there was no file for “employees with skills to be considered.”

I brought them in, Luc made copies, and before I knew it, Trevor Eagles, the Chief Engineer, was offering me a position. In engineering, steady days, weekends off, seniority intact. I accepted. All I had to do was give notice to my crew that I was leaving. I discovered that my Captain, Ron Maxwell, had a big part in my being accepted. He’d extolled my virtues, his having done so no small thing, apparently.
All I had to do was work off my notice, almost all of it supervising, my first and final stretch going solo. Thank God Kim Hicks was the cross-shift supervisor. He helped me line up my crew and helped me remember how to fill out SIMs, the program that charts payroll and work accomplished.

I set about doing my beat. No white hat yet. I’d yet to pick one up. And there was no need for one now, either.

Midway through the shift, the hoist paged me on the radio.

“What’s up?” I asked. They couldn’t see the skip. Bugs. Gremlins. And they couldn’t raise the guy working on the loading pocket level. I said I’d look into it. I called first, getting Pete first ring. So much for the hoist not being able to raise him.

“Can you take a peek into the shaft,” I asked, “to see if you can see the skips?”

“Sure,” Pete said. Moments passed and he picked the phone back up and said, no, he couldn’t.
Then the hoist paged me again. I thanked Pete and said I’d be right down to sort the problem out myself, and hung up. I called the hoist.

“Pete opened the cage door without calling me,” he said. “We were lucky the cage wasn’t in motion or it would have tripped.”

Shit. There are lots of laws and procedures about shafts and doors to shafts and open shafts and such. Pete should never have done that. He should have called the hoist before doing anything. But Pete was not a cage tender or a hoist man, so he wouldn’t have known them; but Pete did know one simple rule that everyone underground knew: the cage tender is the only person who shall touch the shaft doors.

 Keep thy hands off!

When I asked Pete to look into the shaft to see if he could see the skip, I thought he’d only walk around the shaft, peeking into it at points here and there to see what he could see. He didn’t. He just looked over the door and when he saw that he couldn’t see anything, he decided to open the door to get a better look. He thought that would be okay, he was in Oreflow, after all.

But it wasn’t okay. Laws dictate fall restraint or fall arrest when near an open hole. Laws dictate that “open shaft” need be noted in the log book. And those are only two of the rules and laws.

Now I had to give Pete a talkin’ to.

The hoist was all for giving him a warning slip.

I was less inclined. His was an honest mistake. And I believed that warning slips ought to be reserved for gross misconduct and willful disregard for the rules.

Why? Because I’d received warning slips for stupid things before and that only got me mad. I didn’t learn anything except that sometimes supervision gave warning slips to exercise and feel their power.

Like the time that me and my partner had received one for not doing a post-check on our crusher system conveyor. A post-check? We’d never heard of a post-check before. There were pre-checks, which might as well be considered a “post-check.” But a pre-check is really only a cover your ass check, to make sure you weren’t held responsible for the prior shift’s breakage.

Sean and I had the proverbial nightmare shift. The muck kept hanging up, constantly having to be washed down to keep it running. But too much water invariably migrated to the inner belt, causing it to go out of alignment. When that happened, mids and fines spilled inside, collecting in and around the tail pulley. Too much muck in the tail pully and it jumped the track. We did not notice that it jumped the track. When our cross-shift came on, the first to see the mess called his boss, and his boss and the captain wanted to rush down and take pictures, proof of Sean and my evil-doings. Buddy’s partner was livid when discovering that his partner had “ratted” out on us, saying, “They had the shift from hell trying to keep the muck moving, and you ratted out on them for trying to do their job.” He then worked like the devil to set the tail pulley back on its rails before the bosses arrived.

So, Sean and I were only cited with leaving a mess and not reporting it (hence the post-check BS) and for going up early without permission.

We deserved that last one. We were soaked and chaffing with grit and could not reach our shift boss. So, we went up early without permission.

But we were railroaded by the other made-up charge.

And the corrective discipline backfired. They needed Sean and me to do something to save our supervisor’s ass and we stepped back, stood by, and said “That’s so sad. Ain’t that a shame.” And we worked to rule for a couple months afterwards, too, just for good measure.

So, I didn’t see the need to use a heavy hammer on Pete for an honest error. I took Pete aside and explained what he’d done and why it was wrong, repeating the age-old wisdom of “the shaft door belongs to the cage tender and only he can lay a hand on it.” I had to tell him that I was giving him an informal verbal warning (there’s no such thing, only actual verbal warning notices and warning slips), telling him that if he ever did something like that again that I would have to formally discipline him.
”When you’re a cage tender,” I said, doubting that he ever would be one, “You can open the door to the shaft,” then adding, “but only when you have the cage. When the hoist has the shaft, hands off.”

Pete took it in stride. He even thanked me for taking it easy on him. He shook my hand.

I thought on all the things I’d seen my partners do over the years. Some had only the dimmest view of how to work safely. I thought that were I to have continued supervising, I’d have to deal out one or two actual warning slips from time to time.

I didn’t like that thought of that.

Not one bit.

I’d become The Man. I hated The Man.