Billy Young's Blog - Posts Tagged "learning"
20th April 2012
After my weeks holiday it has been a surprising good week at work. I think it helped that I was learning the retort (basically a giant pressure cooker). Even though has been some weeks since I last was training on it I’m now getting the hang off the basics. I still have to be taught the main control panel, how to set the program for cooking times and that sort of thing. Still you don’t learn new things in one go so the slow steady pace is best. I have taken some notes on the control panel lay out and am writing down little bits on the different buttons as I’m told what they are. It helps set it more firmly in my mind as well as comes in useful so I can check if I do forget what they do.
On Wednesday I took a bit of a ribbing when one of the retorts broke down. As you can imagine everyone was asking what I’d done. It was a good laugh. Of course it was nothing to do with me really. Rather one of the safety valves started to release the steam pressure as the boiler reached the correct setting. The engineers took most of yesterday morning to fix it as it had been late in the day on Wednesday when we began having problems. It still caused a little log jam for a time it took to get it back up and running though nothing that slowed production. In the end Jim, the man training me, got everything back running as if nothing had went wrong. Well he has years of experience so it was nothing new to him. Just watching him you pick things up, you can’t help yourself.
It is also good to have the experience there behind you when you do mess up even if it is minor. Yes I made a mess of putting in one of the taco-graphs that record the temperature inside the retorts. When putting it in I didn’t move the arm out of the way so the taco got a red score of ink across it. Jim then showed me how to set the arm using the control panel before putting the graph in. In fact I messed it up twice now which I’ll need to be more careful with in future. The second time I didn’t make sure all the taco-graphs were set to the correct time. Of course they were quickly potted by Jim and put to right with a patient wisdom rather than a telling off. So all was well in the end.
On Wednesday I took a bit of a ribbing when one of the retorts broke down. As you can imagine everyone was asking what I’d done. It was a good laugh. Of course it was nothing to do with me really. Rather one of the safety valves started to release the steam pressure as the boiler reached the correct setting. The engineers took most of yesterday morning to fix it as it had been late in the day on Wednesday when we began having problems. It still caused a little log jam for a time it took to get it back up and running though nothing that slowed production. In the end Jim, the man training me, got everything back running as if nothing had went wrong. Well he has years of experience so it was nothing new to him. Just watching him you pick things up, you can’t help yourself.
It is also good to have the experience there behind you when you do mess up even if it is minor. Yes I made a mess of putting in one of the taco-graphs that record the temperature inside the retorts. When putting it in I didn’t move the arm out of the way so the taco got a red score of ink across it. Jim then showed me how to set the arm using the control panel before putting the graph in. In fact I messed it up twice now which I’ll need to be more careful with in future. The second time I didn’t make sure all the taco-graphs were set to the correct time. Of course they were quickly potted by Jim and put to right with a patient wisdom rather than a telling off. So all was well in the end.
