Day Eleven: Buffing, buffing all day long!

Eight hours straight (with breaks) is a lot to be doing one thing. I now understand what factory workers have to deal with, and it's not a job I want to be doing.

Luckily, today was the last day for a while that I'll be having to buff all day long. However, there is the fact that I will spend four straight weeks doing this during my training at some point. I just hope that point doesn't come soon.

I tend to wear through a lot of gloves while buffing. It's actually pretty amazing how hot the metal gets under the wheel. Enough to burn through two layers of cloth gloves. Hot, hot, hot!

The smell of the buffing wheel is almost like crayons with a little bit of margarine. The stuff is made out of animal fat and wax, after all. The wheel is powerful. Enough to rip pieces out of your hand and fling them across the room or, worse, send them flying into the big vacuum sucky thingie that sucks in all the fibers flying off the wheel. I'll be getting a picture of that soon.

Hands and gloves end up black after half an hour. The stuff that gets on the skin through the gloves is pretty hard to remove.

I'm happy that, most likely, buffing is going to be a small part of my actual job once I have a career in this field. It is fun in small doses, but when you have to keep going at it for eight hours at a time it can get pretty monotonous.

Plus, there's the fact that you can't just zone out. You have to pay attention or else the wheel will rip whatever you're buffing right out of your hands, denting it in the process.

In other news, the student I was buffing with was quite cordial. He had a moderate Spanish accent and was doing his best to ask, over the sound of the buffing and my earplugs, why I had decided to go the route of instrument repair when I had a college education.

I thought about telling him that I got that education for free (they paid me to attend) but that was a little bit too complicated to explain through earplugs, masks, buffing wheels, and fans.

Apparently, college debt is a huge driver when it comes to being a productive member of society. Is that a good thing? I don't know.

All I do know is that I'll enjoy my four days off.