The new job is working out quite well. Don’t get me wrong, though. I loved my previous job. I worked with great people, and I will consider them my friends for life. We worked side by side for years.

But this new job… it’s right down the ol’ alley. Yeah, I do have a territory a thousand miles wide, but it was running fine before I got here. In the field, I’m the backup, not the first line of defense. The control techs who actually work at the compressor stations are more than adequate for 99.99% of the jobs, and a lot of what I have to do past that point is telephone stuff.

I get projects. 9000-horsepower projects. And I’m actually in the loop on design and specification, so maybe we won’t see so much of the “I wish they’d built it different” stuff that has plagued me previously.

I’m something kind of strange in the circles I travel in now: an electric power systems person. Prior to my arrival on the scene only one facility had any electrical requirements that couldn’t be hung on a stout pole at the station fence. Now we’ve got three more that will have motors of sufficient size to call “big”, and we’ve gone from 480 volts to 69,000. They’ve gone from transformers which would double for coffee tables to transformers that almost require permits to truck down the highways.

I feel needed. Not in a panicky sense, just in “I’m glad we have you around to take care of this” sense. I’m doing the job not because somebody is too lazy to do it themselves, but because nobody else in the bunch CAN do it.

Feels good…