Typical Day
Meg Awatt wakes up to her cell phone's alarm—Bette Midler's "The Wind Beneath My Wings"—at 6:00AM. She puts on her robe and heads into the kitchen, where she fixes a simple egg on toast. Then she changes into her favorite denim shirt and thick slacks and heads out to her truck to start the day's work.
The truck isn't technically a requirement for the job, but she likes the look of it and she got it for cheap. It also doesn't have the worst mileage in the world. Meg feels badly about that. But on her fourteen dollar an hour wage, saving for a Prius will take a while, especially when she has a mortgage to pay off and a 401(k) to pay into and a college fund to save for her kids. She sighs. Twenty mpg it is.
Meg gets to General Electric at 6:30AM. She works on a team of sixteen wind techs who together service and repair 173 wind turbines in the area. After she gets her assignment for the day (way out in a remote part of her county), she attends a discussion on the environment, health, and safety standards.
Meg's hoping to be a site manager one day, so it's worth it to go to the seminar—even if they always involve terrible coffee and way too many jokes about what the wind whispered in the presenter's ear.
Around 9:00AM, she sets off with her partner, Wendy Farmer, for their site. Wind techs always travel and operate with a partner; turbine repairs are too dangerous to work as solo missions. It's a long hour-and-a-half drive out to the site, so Meg is glad that she's with Wendy, her closest friend on the team and the only other woman in the group of sixteen.
"How're the kids?" Wendy asks.
"They're alright. Joe doesn't seem to like math or physics much."
"How could he not love math? It's your favorite subject."
"Yeah, I guess he didn't get that gene from me. I've tried working in some wind turbine examples—you'd think that calculating the expected energy harvest when the wind is coming in from the south-southwest at twenty mph would be fun, right?"
The conversation helps to pass the time, which is good because "exciting" isn't the word you'd use to describe the scenery on the way to wind turbines in the middle of nowhere. And Wendy's "Summer Driving Hits, Volume Two" playlist is only good for the first twenty listens.
They make good time, arriving at the site just a few minutes past 10:30AM. First, they meet with one of the turbine operators who works there. Today is just an ordinary servicing of a handful of the turbines—nothing special. The turbine operator leads them to the first turbine.
Wendy and Meg ready themselves to make the 250-foot climb to the top. They strap on their safety helmets and stock themselves with clips. Wind techs always use clips to connect themselves to the shaft of the turbine. As you might guess, it gets a little windy up there. Sort of like how the rain forest tends to get a little wet.
The process is tedious, since they need to keep detaching and reattaching the clips as they move up. By noon, they're on the top of the turbine.
"Look down," Wendy says, "Isn't it beautiful up here?"
Meg sighs. Wendy thinks the view from every turbine she climbs is beautiful. Meg doesn't have that kind of, ahem, poetic soul. She's clipped onto the turbine shaft, but she's a little more concerned with the blowing wind that sounds like a pack of howler monkeys screeching in her ear.
"I'd rather not. Come on, Wendy, let's just do this thing."
Inside the hatch, Meg and Wendy go through their typical routine. They tighten all of the bolts, which tend to loosen themselves when the turbine is on and vibrating. (It's turned off while the wind techs are servicing it, naturally.) They check fluid levels, change filters, and clean all of its parts.
Then they climb down the same ladder they went up.
At around 4:00PM, Meg and Wendy climb down from their fifth turbine. Again, no issues to report, just the standard tightening of bolts and replenishing of fluids. Meg doesn't want there to be any issues, of course, but after climbing over a quarter mile both up and down the turbines, she feels a bit like Sisyphus when it turns out everything is in fine working order. Oh well, sometimes you just have to keep pushing that rock up the hill.
Meg and Wendy retrace their footsteps, driving back to the headquarters in the GE-issued car. Meg picks up her truck around 6:00PM, heading home to do a few math problems with Joe—another rock, another hill. One day that boy will like math. One day.