Work week in review

Here’s a couple of highlights of my week:

One of my clients lives in Oakland, and has been handing out face masks to the homeless because it is so smoky there. That is so thoughtful!

Here is another highlight; an email from a different client after I had a coaching session with his wife…”[she] came upstairs [after the session] so extremely positive about our relationship. It was amazing. We had such a great talk.”

I had 7 clients this week and I only have timeslots for 8. So I’m nearly filled up. I had dropped my rates after I moved to New Mexico, because they had seemed too high (the economy here is so different than California). But none of my clients are in New Mexico anyway. They are mostly on the east and west coasts. I might consider raising my rates again at the new year.

Also this week my websites were hacked. That wasn’t so much of a highlight of the week as maybe a lowlight. It’s all fixed now, but it took a lot of time in an already hectic week.

In other good news, I got my first paycheck from my new job. I finally know enough to be able to get a certain amount of “real work” done, but am still mostly in training. The work is ridiculously complicated at first, but won’t be that hard once I get the hang of it.  I’m in the “Records Group” and our task is basically just document review and database upkeep, but there’s a million different steps that vary depending on each slightly different situation.

I still really like my boss and am really sad she’s leaving. I’m also starting to get worried as I see the scope of everything she’s been doing. She’s not primarily a manager – she’s primarily the one who has been doing all the work. And it’s not clear to me than anyone else knows how to do all of it. And it seems more than I could possibly learn in the next few weeks, because there are so many different special situations, “oh, that’s different, that’s an exception because…so instead we need to do this other thing…”

It’s a good thing I like organization, because this job is mostly just a huge and nearly impossible organizational challenge. I will probably also be learning something about air quality along the way.  But currently I’m mostly learning about our regulatory process, not about air quality.

Although we had an excellent training course about sulfur dioxide. That is scary shit. It’s very toxic, and very common in industry. The scary thing about it is most people assume they can reliably stay away from it because it stinks horribly. But what people don’t realize, is that at higher concentrations, you can’t smell it! Or at medium concentrations you quickly lose the ability to smell it (and mistakenly think it’s no longer there). The first effect it has on the body is to knock out your sense of smell. In high concentrations it can kill instantly.

In the class we got to try out different types of PPE (personal protection equipment). In this case, they are air tanks (like scuba tanks). Industrial workers may also wear equipment with air lines that are attached to an air source (so they are dragging an air line around). Those are used by workers who are working on gas lines. The most we’d ever need to do is carry a small emergency air tank if we were going to inspect a really hazardous area. I’m not an inspector though, so it’s unlikely I’d need to do that.

I may be doing occasional site visits, and I might be in an area where I would need to wear a gas monitor, which will alarm if readings are too high.  It’s not uncommon to need to wear monitors at Sandia as well. A common type of monitor used at Sandia is a dosimeter, which is a monitor that detects ionizing radiation. I only had to wear one once, but many of my coworkers wore them regularly. The monitors my new coworkers may occasionally need to wear for inspections detect one or more toxic gasses.