Dad’s Laboratory
(left to right: Gregg Mitchell, Gregg Mitchell, Gregg Mitchell, and Gregg Mitchell)
My dad has worked at the City of Sidney Waste Water Treatment Plant for close to 30 years. We very commonly refer to it as a “crappy job”. Most of that time has been spent as the lab technician, however he had a stint as the industry liaison. This was not the role for him, and he has since taken his lab back.
I have fond memories of going to the lab with my brother and seeing all of the cool stuff dad worked with. Burning filters like flash paper, magnetic stirrers, all the cool microscopes and beakers. One time he dissolved the zinc out of the center of a penny and brought the copper foil of the faces home to show us. With no idea of what I wanted to do before taking my first programming class, its no wonder I always figured I’d end up doing bio-chem and working in a lab!
Office Culture:
“You have to have a weird sense of humor to work there” easily describes the culture of the treatment plant. A long running prank was pulled with a ThinkGeek Annoy-A-Tron (shared under promise of anonymity*).
Tourism:
Private schools in the area took field trips to the Waste Water Treatment Plant every once in a while. Showing off a “poop factory” to a bunch of schoolkids is bound to deliver some stories.
Kids would comment on the immediate smell in the area.
Dad would show off his lab.
Sometimes this would coincide with the periodic emergency shower test. In these instances, at the end of the tour he would pull it to let all the kids watch. I’ll admit to being a little jealous as we never saw this in our private tours (getting “private” tours and still being jealous sounds bad when written out).
Part of the tour would include pulling a core sampler out of the settling tanks. These were long poles that were handled manually. The kids would “eew” (no “aww”-ing) when dad got to the poop part and asked if anyone had gloves he could borrow. He obviously played up the grossness and hesitated before putting his hand in, egging them on. As he likes to say, you have to have a weird sense of humor to work there. That happens to explain a lot about him…
Dad fielded some fun questions from inquiring members of the public who had access to a phone book, saw the “Water” in “Waste Water Treatment Plant”, and started dialing without a second thought!
“Do you fill swimming pools?”
To which the only logical response was
“We can but you probably wouldn’t like it…”
One of my favorite things I’ve stolen from dad is part of his email signature. It’s always fun to forget about it for a couple of months until someone notices and mentions it! I now use it in both my personal and work email signatures.
While no trees were harmed in the sending of this email, several million electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Remote work:
Being in tech and at a company with a great work from home policy, I sometimes forget that not every industry has the same luxury. I was reminded of this when dad reached out over Facebook to say that his phone was in the septic tank at home and he couldn’t text for the time being. He had been checking it with his phone in his shirt pocket, and as he leaned over it fell out. This was the source of some good laughs and a reminder that not everyone should bring their work home.
Rivalries:
Complementing the “Waste” portion, there is the Water Treatment Plant on the other side of town. Their job is to take in water from the river and clean it to drinking standards for the city. Makes sense. It was always fun to hear the (hopefully) joking rivalries about how easy the Water Treatment job was, since their water had been cleaned by the town north of us before they released it downstream to us. “Anybody can clean clean water!”
* They’ll never think to look here. You’re in the clear, dad!
Written by a human.
For questions, bug reports, or complaints, please contact me!