Sunday, July 28, 2013

Under The Influence Of A New Job


July, 5, a date as ordinary as any other date but with "meteorologically" high temperatures. I receive via cell phone a message from my wife. I felt the cell phone vibrating in my shirt's pocket, took it out and read the SMS: "Are you holdin'up the heat?" I looked around: I was in the main deck of an iron vessel still under construction inside a dry dock, which is the same to say that I was inside an oven. Nearby a worker was welding some sort of a fundamental metallic piece to the ceiling, releasing a small shower of incandescent drops and provoking lightnings that seemed to set the air on fire. Not very far another worker was operating an electirc grinder finishing an eventual work that was left behind and making any verbal/vocal communication with my fellow workers almost impossible. In fact, when I reached for my cell phone I've had just shouted with my mouth sticked to one of them's ear a work instruction. Behind me the fulminant light of a blowtorch cutting a metal plate would hurt the eyes of whom accidentally stared at that operation. As background noise there was still workers outside the ship that were correcting a warpage on the surface of the hull hammering a metalic section with a 5 Kg mallet in a cadenced rithm that ressounded throughout the whole vessel, making the tympans vibrate dangerously. I concentrated again in the message that I've just received. I pressed the virtual keys to answer it: " Yes, it's hot."