It was Halloween? What? When did that happen!? Actually, I did bring a costume pun to the ferry, but I put it on once and that was it. I had fairy wings and a captain's hat. I was a fairy captain! Get it?! I showed it to one of my favorite regulars, who cracked up.
Today was my first day of being a trainer. A few months ago, they hired two relief operators, guys who will work on the bridge or road crew, and can be called in as a sub on either ferry as needed. Each of the two guys have spent about a month working the WL ferry, and are doing a week on the BV. So around 8 this morning, M came on board. Really nice guy, spent 4 years in the Army, 15 months in Iraq as a heavy equipment operator, mostly working on building roads and removing land mines. He's a total smartass, has a foul mouth and a good sense of humor, so we got along pretty well. Even so, it was sort of exhausting suddenly having someone share the ferry with me all day. There's only one chair, there are hour long periods with no cars, the guy's been working on a ferry for a month and already knows what he's doing. So it was tiring. He spent a lot of the day playing Plants vs. Zombies on my (omg i freaking love it it's the best thing ever) brand new iPad. As nice as he was (and no mom, not date-able, he's too young for me), I was glad when it was time for him to go. I'll get him again on wednesday, then next week, I'll spend 3 days with R, another trainee.
So along with training, we had boat problems. The gate on the boat, the one that keeps cars from rolling into the river, stopped working. It wouldn't go up. For awhile, I could futz with it, and get it up eventually, but finally today, it just stopped. Boss knew about it, and spent at least an hour on the ferry this morning trying to diagnose where the problem was. We finally came to the conclusion that it was one of two problems. Boss went off, and I figured it'd be some time tomorrow before it got fixed. In the meantime, I had to chock each car, stick a heavy rubber wedge under a tire, as a failsafe measure so the cars wouldn't roll into the river. That was exhausting too. It was just tiring all day!
So then around 5ish, the boss walks onto the ferry. Really? What are you doing here?! He said that J--a county welder who's also all around handy--was also on his way. They were going try to fix it. It took almost 2 hours, having to turn cars away, and a lot of standing around doing nothing while J climbed into the bilge, the 3 foot high space between the hull and the deck, to replace a solenoid. Amazingly, it worked, and they left just in time for me to shut down for the night.
I was hoping that I'd see kids going into town to go trick or treating, but I only saw two kids (zombie and mummy). Gave them both candy though! And I hoped that I'd get home in time to get a bunch of kids come by, but I only got one knock at the door, for a vampire, zombie and hello kitty.
Tomorrow I get to sleep an hour later. I've got a training at the shops, so I'll get to see my friends too.
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