First of all, my team is absolutely wonderful. They work really hard and when I ask them to do something, they just go do it. They're also silly and ridiculous a lot of the time. I got super lucky there. I have 10 people, five male and five female. I think I have the best shuffled team too. Most of the other teams have like four people from one regular team and none from another or something, but I have three pairs of people from the same team, then one from each of the other four teams. It doesn't get any more shuffled than that. I think that's a plus, since it avoids having people only hang out with the people from their regular team who they're really comfortable with.
Second, we live in tents. We have two porta-potties at our campsite and get all our water from a tap on the side on the maintenance yard garage at the nearby Walnut Canyon. You know those Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck if" jokes? We make a lot of "You know you're homeless when" jokes because we wait to brush our teeth and put in contacts if we know we're going to be in a public restroom soon. Also, a few times when it's been super cold at night, we've brought our sleeping pads and sleeping bags into that same maintenance garage to sleep. Yep, we take shelter in a garage when it's too cold to sleep where we normally do.
My project is...interesting. Or something. The scenery is beautiful. We've only worked at Walnut Canyon and Wupatki National Monuments so far, but we'll probably be at a few others before we leave. You should go Google those right now since I don't have any pictures yet. There have been a few frustrations so far though, including:
Job #1 We've Had to Redo: At Walnut, in the parking lot by the visitor center, there was a HUGE dirt pile. Our first task with that was to pull out the pieces of asphalt, concrete, and rock from the dirt and make separate piles. That's right, we sorted rocks. Then we brought out wheelbarrows to bring dirt out to the Rim Trail and spread it out to be like a shoulder off the newly-paved trail. (That's what all the random pieces of asphalt came from.) We thought we were done, then our supervisor walked the trail with me and pointed out all the places that could use more dirt, so we did it again. Then after I had not been on the trail for a while, my team told me they were done again, so I told the supervisor. He then walked the trail with me again and pointed out MORE spots. Bleurgh.
Job #2 We've Had to Redo: At Walnut, we dug up a bunch of signs and moved them to other places along the Rim Trail, which turned out to be much more of an ordeal than it sounds. The ones we had to dig up all had big pieces of concrete on the bottom. Then we were told we could put the in the ground in the new place with the concrete still on, but it turns out there's really no way to make them sturdy that way, so we had to go back and break the concrete off and pour new concrete. I can't really complain because I was off the work site doing paperwork and getting some van maintenance done when they had to do the new concrete, but my team wasn't happy about it.
Job #3 We've Had to Redo: We then moved on to Wupatki. We were met by an archaeologist who explained that there was a historic stone walkway that led up to an employees-only area. The stones all had to be removed last fall because they had to put in a gas line that ran the entire length of the walkway. The archaeologist had taken 40 pictures of the walkway and the stones all got placed on numbered palates, so we would at least have a general idea of what area each stone should go in. The archaeologist didn't have any tools for us and had no idea of the technique for doing this. The project was literally "Here are some pictures of how it used to look. The stones are over there. Make it look like this again." So it began with a massive puzzle, laying the stones out to match the pictures (most of which were super distorted due to the archaeologist being pretty short, so the pictures were taken at a fairly sharp angle). We then spread ourselves out along the walkway to start digging them in once we had tools, but we had a few different opinions of how to go about doing such a thing. We were visited by another archaeologist one day, who went along looking at everyone's work and basically told us we were all doing a good job. The next day, our regular supervisor (who hadn't been with us for several days) informed us that that second archaeologist told him which group he thought was doing it right, and that everyone else would have to redo their work. That walkway was only supposed to take us one of our four-day weeks, but tomorrow will be day # 7 on it because no one told us how to do it at first.
So yeah. My team is generally pretty happy, so even though they get frustrated at having to redo things, everyone's attitude is still pretty good.
If you want to try a fun game, keep an eye on the weather in Flagstaff, then think of my team living in tents/a maintenance garage. There have been some pretty cold nights. I've started amusing myself with counting how many articles of clothing I wear. I frequently get up to 13 at night. That's ridiculous!
Oh, Courtney, what a riot! You hadn't told me about the dirt or the signs. I think that your team is as lucky to have you as their leader as you are to have them. I doubt there are very many who could handle everything you've had to handle with anything like your aplomb. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
ReplyDeleteBleurgh is such an appropriate comment! LOLOL
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