Platteville Sucks

Did you guys miss me while I was gone? I didn't think so. This was my third trip to Platteville for training. I think I have gotten all I can out of the experience. I would like to officially go on the record and say that Platteville sucks. Don't ever go there. The class I was taking, Aggregate Testing, is required to be 32 hours. In reality it could be done in 12 maybe 10 hours. I think we spent 5 hours of class on learning how to generate random numbers. Maybe in a future posting I will teach you how to do it in a paragraph or two, because it really is that simple of a concept. Hilt, if you are reading this, you would know. So what were the highlights of my four days in Platteville. The instructor of the course was sort of a leaker and made bad jokes. On Monday, first thing he went over was the course schedule and then safety procedures which took maybe 20 minutes. In transitioning to another topic he asked "After what section did I say the first break was?" I raised my hand and said "I think you said right after the safety section?" I don't know if you know any engineers other than me, but normally they don't have fantastic sense of humor. Not surprisingly no one laughed. Actually I don't know what I was doing in this class, since it was geared toward engineering technicians. I think I was the only one in the class with a four year engineering degree. I was also one of the youngest ones in the class. Later in that first day, we were covering the procedure for retrieving a sample of aggregate from a stockpile. For instance a big pile of gravel that a front end loader is loading into dump trucks. To demonstrate how to do this, they had a pile of sand and a little tonka truck front end loader. The instructor was going over the procedure of making the front end loader operator make three piles and back dragging them in order to get a sample. And he was showing how this would be done with the pile of sand and the toy end loader. When he finished he asked if there were any questions, I raised my hand and asked "Can you do that again but this time with sound effects?" Again no one laughed. As far as other highlights of the trip, Tuesday I took a dump so big that I plugged the toilet. I have never known anyone who plugged a hotel toilet. I know it is gross, what is more gross is that I nearly took a picture and posted it here. But I didn't. The final highlight of my trip, and this just goes to further demostrate how boring Platteville is, yesterday we got out of class early and I actually went and washed my truck. The movie theater didn't have a single movie playing that was remotely interesting. The place just plain sucks. Don't go there. Here are a couple of pictures.

And here I am washing my truck. You didn't believe me did you? Check out that form.