Weekly update

We had our annual safety rally today. This is a yearly, hour-long meeting that means we start our real work an hour later than we should, but we get served breakfast (breakfast tacos and tamales), juice and coffee and have the chance to win fabulous* prizes.

The safety rally is like a pep rally except with no band, the cheerleaders are barely awake and not really very attractive (to be generous), and instead of saying "our team can beat your team!" they say "our team can do their job without getting too terribly injured all that often most of the time..."

So I won one prize based on a random drawing and it was an "emergency road kit" that I am not heartless enough to inflict on my worst enemy. A flashlight and a tire gauge that are both guaranteed to break on their first attempted use and to be a fair, a pen that works (for the time being). It also came with a pocket road atlas allegedly published by Mapquest but I think it must be from their Malaysian sweat shop division and from it I learned that we apparently have a new state called Kentuckiana, or possibly Louisitucky.

Then we saw a video clip from "The Office" which I must admit was quite humorous and a slide show of my company's workers in "action" to the tune of...yes, of course you have guessed it..."The Safety Dance." One photo of a snake elicited a murmur from the room; I am still quite amused by co-workers (and customers) who are mortally afraid of patchnose snakes and garden spiders.

When the meeting was over they told us we could grab anything on the "prize table." I wanted to get one of their lined winter hoods for my jacket but by the time I got to the table the only thing left was a pocket snakebite kit. I haven't opened it yet--it's still sealed in plastic--but according to the contents listed on the lid, the accepted practice is now to use the enclosed sterile syringes to suck the venom out of the bite site. Really.

It was still an easy week this week. I was in charge of training a new temp, but it's a guy I've worked with before on two previous jobs and he was already thoroughly familiar with reading gas & electric meters so he had no trouble shifting right into reading water meters. The weather was great this week, finally getting some serious cooling off. That only day it rained, it happened so early that we did have to deal with flooded meters but we didn't actually rained on. So that was nice.

*Note for readers: I will use the word "fabulous," but only in an ironic context.