Share something the world doesn't know about your job

[George N. M.]

Boisdarc:  And in a correctional institution you are only seeing the sexual offenders who have been caught and are often multiple offenders.  That is something that is very hard to rehabilitate someone away from.  When I was a prosecutor and working with child protection cases it reached a point where I assumed that it would be a waste of everyone's time to try to rehabilitate someone or that it would never be possible to safely reunite a family.  There were exceptions to this rule but many could not be safely integrated into society.  Too bad for everyone involved.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[seldom (dick renker)]

My current job is an EIC, employee in charge and formerly called a flag man on a railroad. Main job is to keep contractors and trains separate and still keep both working. it is not a physical job but mental and there are nights I come home exhausted. because if the trains and contractors get together it will be ugly. often time you end up juggling like a one armed paper hanger, many moving parts.

[Shabumi]

My family has raised mini dachshunds for 30+ years. We have the longest unbroken line of them in the US, 26 generations of unbroken lineage registered to Akc (3 or 4 more before we started registering, im not sure as that was before I was born), and to my knowledge we are the largest breeder of mini dachshunds on the west coast. Things you may not know about raising dogs is that it is way more work than people think to raise a litter right. Each litter should have as much effort put into it as you would a human baby. Also to do it right you need to plan your breedings generations in advance. We are far enough into our lines that we know what we will get from each breeding so we only plan 2 generations ahead, but when starting out you should have a plan for at least 4-5 generations in advance, as you should when you start breeding ANY animal or plant. We keep females from our lines that have great mothering abilities, and in doing so we have increased the amout of puppies per litter, and reduced the amount of c sections to maybe one a year, which is very small considering we have 3-5 litters every other month. We would rather keep pups from a litter with 4 good puppies that are uniform instead of one with 6 puppies where there is 1 or 2 amazing pups and 1 or 2 runts, that way as our quality increases, all our dogs get better not just a few. Dispostion is also something we have bred for since the beginning, and in doing so have no dogs that would be considered intense. None of our puppies are predisposed to being skittish, aggressive, hyper or yappy, not to say they can't learn that behavior though. To me these are basic animal husbandry practices, but apparently they arent basic to everyone.

A big part of our job is to be a grief counselor,  a good portion of our customers have just lost a dog and we need to console them without pushing our dogs on them. Even if they don't get a pup from us then, they tell us that we help them quite a bit and generally come back to us when they are ready. We do all our own marketing, deliveries (up to 3 hours of driving away, after we have met the family), screening of potential families, and because we are 45 minutes from our regular vet (2 hours if its an off time emergency) we do most of our own vet work and have gotten so good at it that we have taught our newest vet (took over when our old vet retired) some things about canine nutrition, pulling stuck pups and the proper way to hold a trouble dachshund that won't allow the vet to examine it. Our vet knows that if we need to bring a dog in then it must be life threatening. We now have dogs in every state, except a few states in the mid west (puppy mill country), as well as Canada and we even shipped a few to Germany.

Also to be clear, we are NOT a puppy mill. Our dogs are in climate controlled pens, in groups of 2-4 dogs in each pen, and have free access to fenced yards that are at least 20'x20', unless they are ready to whelp, which is when we bring them into the whelping pens in our living room so we can keep an eye on them and can be there when they have the puppies. Some mothers have their pups only when we are right there, others wait until we leave the room to go to the bathroom then pop out 3 pups before we get back. The puppies are raised in our house and are well socialized by men, women and children before they go to their new homes. We also get them used to having their nails trimmed and having their eyes ears and mouth looked at so they dont pull away from their new family vet. We have even had vets call to ask what we do to them to make them so nice to examine. The short answer is imprinting from the beginning. 

We are extremely selective of what we choose to breed. Each prospect MUST be as good if not better than both parents to be kept back as potential breeders. If they don't breed naturally, we don't force them. If they don't get bred by the time they are 2 then we find a home for them, free of charge. We also retire and re home them free of charge by the time they are 4 or 5, that way they can still live long happy lives with a family.

Sorry this post is so long, I started typing and more came out than expected. Below is a small example of the dogs we produce.

[Frosty]

I've had worse jobs. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[boisdarc]

dang those dogs are cute. I have a working theory, baby animals are cute.

[Scott NC]

  The process that made the blue cheese dressing you had at supper could blow a hole in the ground 50' deep and flatten/incinerate a 10 city block radius.  If something went "wrong" that is.   

[JHCC]

Good thing I had oil and vinegar, then. 

[Scott NC]

  I no longer work there.  BTW its in that too depending on the oil you chose.  Vinegars probably ok though.  

[ThomasPowers]

Yes; there used to be a Hydrogenation plant in Columbus Ohio in the old anvil making works.  Now Condos. I wonder if having the possibility of a massive explosion fairly close to the city center had anything to do with the "conversion".

[Frosty]

18 hours ago, boisdarc said:

dang those dogs are cute. I have a working theory, baby animals are cute.

There's been a lot of discussion about babies developing cute features to encourage adults to care for and protect them. Personally I think it's one of two things, cute is the only thing keeping us from drowning the pesky mites. Or and higher on my probably list, Adults evolved to think they're cute so we'd have someone to take care of us when we get old. Certain features need to start out larger than others, brains and eyes being two so heads and eyes tend to be large proportionally across almost all species, look at a tad pole. Hmmm. 

I LOVE blue cheese dressing. mmmmmmmm.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

Have you ever tried a blue cheese cheeseburger? Wow what a taste treat, just have antacid handy. I really miss our local cafe, which has been closed from the beginning of the pandemic. We would meet with friends for Sunday breakfast every Sunday. All sat at the big liars table.

[rockstar.esq]

Nodebt, your comment reminded me of something I've only had a passing interaction with.  According to several local authorities having jurisdictions, the process to extract THC  from Marijuana must done in "explosion-proof" rooms. 

As one might expect, these rooms are terrifically expensive to build.  From what I've seen of explosion proof rooms in this industry, there are no interlocks preventing (or even warning) someone from opening the explosion proof door when there are high concentrations of explosive vapors in the room.  There are no airlock anteroom chambers either.  The risk just wasn't worth it for us to take on those jobs.

[ThomasPowers]

Funny how such things "happen".  When AT&T was required to throw open all their patents in the Consent Degree; it included the one for the Transistor.  However the patent for zone refining pretty much the only commercial method of getting silicon pure enough to use for transistors and integrated circuits at the time was not issued until AFTER the "everything up to this date mandate"; just hours after...

[Scott NC]

  rocksrar.esq, thc is an oil so I assume it is extracted using the same process on a much smaller scale.  We didn't have explosion proof doors, not to mention interlocks.  Though, all components, motors, pumps, sensors, etc.. from start to finish were interlocked, so one broken cotter key or hot bearing and down she went.  It was a behemoth to start back up.   They did cable the steel building siding to the structural beams inside.     No cell phones, key fobs, zippos and so on.  All the electrical and mechanical components were "special construction".   Very expensive.

 

  We had some hair raising adventures in there.

[rockstar.esq]

Nodebt,

It was my extremely superficial understanding that their extraction process was chemical as it involved volatile stuff like Benzine.  

[Fowllife]

To tie into to current part of this conversation, I am an architectural designer by trade. I create preliminary, bid, and construction drawings for commercial and industrial projects (yeah, I'm the guy Rockstar is usually complaining about making poor quality drawings, although I don't usually do electrical/mechanical drawings).It could be something as small as adding a new door to a warehouse or a small office renovation, or as large as a multi million dollar office building or 100k + square foot warehouse.The part of my job most people don't know if a lot of what I do is code research. The main building code references hundreds of other code books for specific life safety issues and hazards, like explosion proof areas as mentioned above. I need to know the main building & ADA code, as well as be familiar with plumbing, mechanical, and electrical codes and be able to reference any NFPA codes that may pertain to he project I'm working on.

There are multiple categories for explosion proof construction with varying requirements depending on the hazard.  I have only worked on a couple, all had explosion panels that were designed to blow out in the chance of an explosion. By having the panels blow out the energy would be released and the integrity of the main structure would be kept intact by sacrificing parts of the exterior walls. I do not enjoy working on hazardous projects as there is a lot of research and back and forth between MSDS sheets, NFPA codes, and building codes and they do not use the same standards.

[JHCC]

The first I ever heard of that kind of construction was in a documentary about the history of the Du Pont family. It mentioned that their first gunpowder mill was built of stone, with one side in wood to allow explosions to blow out on the side away from their other buildings.

[ThomasPowers]

One of the people from EMRTC was supposed to be on Nightline last night to talk about the Beirut explosion.  Anybody see it?  (No TV at my house.)    Living near an explosives research organization means that people are fairly used to BANGS  going off. (Their Open Houses are a lot of fun!)

[JHCC]

I didn't see Nightline, but I have seen footage of the Beirut explosion online. Pretty horrific. There was one video clip from the live broadcast of a service in a Catholic church about three miles from the blast; first the lights go out, and then all the stained glass windows get blown in by the blast wave. 

[ThomasPowers]

What amazed me were the grain silos---pretty much at ground zero; yet a lot still standing!   Of course they may have been engineered for grain explosions.

[JHCC]

I suspect it was a combination of that and the shock-absorbing capacity of the grain itself. Unfortunately, that was 85% of Lebanon's grain supply, so now they're looking at serious food shortages as well.

[ThomasPowers]

Putting all your eggs in one basket and then setting the basket next to the explosives storage.

[JHCC]

Other way round: parking the explosives next to the chicken farm and refusing to move it despite the entreaties of the farmers.

[ThomasPowers]

Yes I caught that too; was it 6 times the port people asked that the AN get moved---and nothing was done?

[Scott NC]

On 8/5/2020 at 5:03 PM, rockstar.esq said:

It was my extremely superficial understanding that their extraction process was chemical as it involved volatile stuff like Benzine.  

  I am not surprised.  We used Hexane.  There was a 6' vapor wall around the place to contain the fumes if there was a line break as it is heavier than air.  I think some old ethanol plants still use conical screw presses to get the oil out.  They are probably antiquated and doomed for bankruptcy.