From: Katie T (kayteese_at_gmail.com)
Date: Thu May 24 2007 - 07:20:57 PDT
=/\= "Grunt Work" (Continued from Matt's "I don't even know") =/\= Location: USS PATRIOT Stardate: 2.7050524.1502 Scene: Main Engineering Main Engineering on the USS PATRIOT was not a very busy place these days. Of course the ship was adequately staffed and apart from one or two minor vacancies all positions were filled with capable officers, but this was a time of shore leave and by nature most people were taking advantage of that as much as they could. In many ways they were bound to do so even if they didn't want to. Starfleet Officers, like any employee, had a guaranteed number of vacation days, but due to the ever changing mission schedules it was sometimes difficult to grant those days. So at times like this, with the PATRIOT safely docked at SB1, Captain Jones could not help it if everyone took advantage of the accumulated off-days. The work however still needed to be done, and this meant lots of opportunity for hands-on practice for Ginny LaGrande. Every morning the cadet received a padd detailing her day's assignments. Due to the PATRIOT's recent encounter with the treacherous Karashi Nebula almost all of the sensors were out of alignment, and a number of different particle streams had contaminated several other systems. It was slow work which required a lot of crawling around in Jeffries tubes, trying to locate an incorrectly ionized power relay here or some malfunctioning flux equalizer there. Ginny was constantly lugging around a heavy toolbox to be prepared for all the other unforeseen malfunctions she encountered "on the side", and by the third day she seriously wondered whether one of the PATRIOT's former chief engineers had had a secret passion for old-fashioned duct tape, which she found in spades in the most unexpected places. She also learned that the ship's environmental control system was truly state of the art, because there wasn't a speck of dust anywhere, not even in the most remote corners she visited. By and by Ginny got better at finding her way around the ship, both in the corridors and in the "backstage world" of catwalks and Jeffries tubes. She also discovered a couple of secret hideaways, for example a small stash of bottles with Saurian Brandy and Romulan Ale beneath the loose deck plating of a tube junction not far away from the Officers' Mess. She left the bottles where they were, but put a note on top warning the owner that the loose piece of plating would be welded back into place permanently within the next week. Another discovery was a collection of pillows and toys in one of the emergency escape pods, which looked like some children had furnished the pod as they would a tree house in their parents' back yard. Ginny had removed all the items and restored the seal on the pod hatch. She still had to find a way to restore the toys to their rightful owners, preferably so that their parents wouldn't know. Apart from this she also put in hours and hours of computer work, mainly realigning sensors but also performing a number of routine maintenance diagnostics. She suspected that not all of those scans were really necessary, but that the staff also wanted to show her that being an engineer did not mean saving the ship through some miracle work every day, but on the contrary meant a lot of boring grunt work and searching through lines and lines of code just to find the one small error. At the end of her shift Ginny sometimes wondered how anyone could do this work for years on end. Then she reminded herself that she was an ACT cadet, and that this assignment was her stepping stone to more complex and fulfilling duties. If she performed well in her training, she would be able to bypass years of being a mere pawn in the system and instead step up to a position of authority and responsibility with relative ease. It was this thought that let her go to bed smiling every night, and which enabled her to start every day of work with a fresh mind and the necessary attention to detail. =/\= NRPG: Time is short for me this week but I wanted to get Ginny at least a little more settled before the mission starts. No interaction this time, but I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunity for that later. Maxine, I'm glad you like Ginny! We have to continue the conversation between her and T'ial at some point. ;) =/\= Katie T. Cadet Eugenie LaGrande ACT Candidate USS PATRIOT From HyperNews_at_youth.net
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