The Nightshift Week
In the days leading up to my
second nightshift week of the season I came down with the bug that had been
doing the rounds of station. Whether it be a cold, the flu, or Covid, something
like that spreads like wildfire here. It was unavoidable, and even to be
expected in these post-quarantine years. On one of the days, my voice took on a
deep, gravelly quality which someone told me sounded sexy. I decided that it
would be a shame not to test out my new found powers, and so I set about trying
to chat up the Chilean Airforce who had arrived in a couple of Twin Otters that
day*. Even with my limited Spanish, ‘yo no tengo mascotas’, and, ‘yo tengo
muchos boligrafos’, I thought it was worth a shot. Unfortunately, it all seems
to have backfired somewhat. We were hoping that they would be staying just the
one night (simply because we need the bedspace), but it’s a week later and they
are still here.
Perhaps as some sort of divine
retribution, the following day I lost my voice. Which wasn’t too much of a
problem as I would shortly be heading onto the nightshift where the need to
talk to anyone would be vastly reduced. However, there was the problem of what
to do in the event of an emergency. A large part of the nightshift job involves
performing three complete checks of vital station infrastructure. This includes
checking all the boilers, the Reverse Osmosis plant, and the generators which
keep the station operational. If any problems are detected with these, it is
then my job to wake up the relevant person or people. So, in the event of my
voice not being loud enough to do this, I decided that the best option would be
to carry an emergency tin whistle around with me, and then I could play a
dramatic tune in their ear to stir them. My musical repertoire is not particularly
vast, but I can just about conjure up Hot Cross Buns and Concerning Hobbits. The
tin whistle fit just nicely inside the chest pocket of my high-viz jacket,
while other pockets were given over to the usual supply of post-it notes and
whiteboard markers. These items are for me as essential as making sure you’ve
got your gloves on to go outside. Most buildings and offices on station have a
whiteboard, and you never know when you’re going to need to leave a post-it
note for someone. These messages can range from, “Hello Logan and Scott, one of
the boilers in NBH has locked out. Everything else is fine. Thanks for keeping
the water flowing. Have a wonderful day, with love from, K x” to “Dear Aurelia,
truth be told: I just can’t stop thinking about Alan Rickman’s voice box, and
how much better my life would be if I could sound like Hans Gruber every once
in a while. That aside, not much to report. Have a wonderful Monday. Take care,
with love from, K x”. Sometimes there is a backstory and some context to these messages,
but sometimes there is not. It has become a nightshift ritual of sorts to leave
messages all around station, and none more so than in the Operations Tower. I’ve
left them a post-it note message every night on every night shift week I’ve
ever done. That’s five and a half seasons worth of post-it notes, and they’ve
kept every single one. There’s a lever arch file to the left of the map board
which has ‘K Archives’ written on the spine. I’ve never been quite brave enough
to look back through them though – it would be like delving straight back into
my brain from another time, and nightshifts are often the strangest of times!
Alongside the checks of station,
and leaving messages around the place, there are also a number of cleaning jobs
that need to be done on the nightshift – things that can only realistically be achieved
when the busyness of the days falls quiet. Even then though, unexpected things
still tend to happen. And last Saturday night was no different. I thought
everyone had left the building and gone to bed, it was now long passed 1am. I
set about cleaning the boot room and the entrance foyer. I picked up all the
indoor shoes, mostly a colourful variety of Crocs. Some mysterious soul had
been adorning the Crocs with those little jibbitz that sit neatly in the holes.
I wondered if it was Addie again. Last season everyone with a pair of Crocs
found that they had a Minion attached to them. No one knew who was doing it until
Addie either fessed up or was caught in the act. I’m not exactly sure how it
went down. Apparently, her mum had wanted to order one for her, but didn’t realise
that ‘Quantity 1’ actually meant one pack of seventy odd. This season it was
Mario Kart characters and various different Pokémon. I got Charmander and was
pretty happy with that. I vacuumed the boot room floor and into the foyer – the
world gets incredibly dusty here at this time of year. Most of the snow around
station has melted away, so folk are walking about on gravelly rock which has a
mind of its own and gets everywhere especially in the dry, dry Antarctic wind. Then
it was onto the mopping – we have a small quantity of Zoflora on station, a
disinfectant that comes in Winter Spice and Clementine and something-or-other.
It’s a delightful fragrance, and for a while it even makes a boot room of a hundred
shoes smell quite nice. But if you don’t do this in the middle of the night,
the sense of having cleaned somewhere would not even last 5 minutes. So,
imagine my disappointment when the previously mentioned Chilean Airforce, along
with Jose and Tania, appeared from upstairs and walked out onto the freshly
mopped foyer floor. Naturally, I attacked them with my mop. A string of apologies
came from Jose and Tania, while the Chileans had retreated to one of the mats
and were huddled there insisting that they would wait until the floor had
dried. Let’s not call it a diplomatic incident, lets call it international collaboration
and an advancement of their military training. The following night, amidst much
laughter and broken Spanish and broken English, they asked if they could help
in anyway, so I put them to work clearing away the remnants of the late-evening
dishes. I’m not sure that a day ever goes by down here that hasn’t been some
strange mix of the surreal and the mundane.
*This is not the entirety of the
Chilean Airforce. Nor were they in Antarctica for military reasons – their Twin
Otters are used to support and enable the Chilean Polar Science operations.
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