It's that time again! NaNoWriMo 2019
- Thread starter S'task
- Start date
As usual, things went wrong when Derek wasn't paying attention.
He'd been told to keep the volume of the radio down enough that he could hear his machine running, but it was long, boring work driving a harvester back and forth across a dryland field. He needed something, anything to keep his mind occupied, and besides, listening at half volume was no way to listen to rock music.
But the radio got boring after a while, so Derek slipped on an earbud and listened to music piped from his phone. But he'd gotten home late last night and forgot to charge the phone, and the battery drained before lunchtime. So he went back to the radio, and he was tuning from one satellite channel to another when he heard the noise. It was a squealing sound, and for a moment he hoped it was just static. Static that wasn't coming the speakers in the cab, somehow.
Then there came a rattling, hard and loud, from somewhere in back of the machine. With a yelp, Derek yanked the speed control stick back and throttled down the engine, but the noise persisted. Frantically, he started flipping switches on his console one by one until the noise finally quit.
The dry heat of the summer day blasted into the cab the moment Derek opened the door and climbed out. It was a sharp contrast to the air conditioned interior, but he barely noticed. He did notice the sticker on the windshield that said G.O.A.L., and that was because he usually ignored it too.
Those letters stood for Get Out And Look. If he heard something suspicious, or saw something suspicious, he was supposed to get out of the harvester and take a look. Most of the time he just eyeballed the trouble from the driver's seat, and it worked nine times out of ten.
That tenth time, and there had been so many tenth times, he'd broken something expensive.
Derek dropped down into the golden wheat and waded around the harvester to the right side, where he'd thought he'd heard the noise come from. But standing there in the clear-cut wheat, he couldn't spot anything wrong.
The harvester combine was a twenty-ton articulated machine that scooped wheat up one and and spit straw and chaff out the other. Somehow, grain was separated out and poured into the bulk tank up top. Derek under stood the theory of what it all did, barely, but he didn't understand how it worked.
The outside of the harvester was a cluttered mess of belts, pulleys, driveshafts, and chains, and most of it was buried under plastic guards. Oh, and there were grease zerks. About a hundred of them, all of which had to be greased first thing in the morning. Frankly, Derek didn't understand what any of them did. Something was broken, but he didn't know where to look.
He had to call for help. Which meant that he had to admit he'd broken something, yet again.
Derek climbed back into the cab and tried to start the harvester again, but it made that awful racket. Finally, he pulled the walkie-talkie off the sun visor and called the other person working the field.
"Alex, my machine's making a funny noise."
After a long time came the reply.
"What?"
"My machine is making a weird noise. It's like a rattling sound."
There was another long pause.
"I'll be there in a few minutes."
================================
After about ten minutes, the other combine in the field finally caught up and parked alongside Derek's machine. The driver got out of his cab and climbed around the upper deck to get a closer look. "What's wrong?"
"Down here, on the other side," Derek called back.
Alex climbed down from his harvester and waded around to where Derek was standing. Unlike Derek, Alex was bearded, white, and he wore prescription safety glasses. "You said it was a rattling sound?"
"Yeah."
"That could be anything," Alex said. "You find the problem yet?"
"No, that's why I called you."
"Was it a regular sound, or was it like a hammering, or-"
"Not a hammering. It was fast."
"Fast. Like a hammer drill?"
Derek shot Alex a look. "What's that?"
"OK," Alex said. "The noise stopped when you shut off the separator?"
Alex wasn't sure what all the separator was, but he knew which switch in his cab controlled it. "Yeah. It stopped almost immediately after I stopped the separator."
"Right," Alex said. "I assume that it wasn't the upper sieve banging against the frame of the combine, because that would be expensive as-
He'd been probing around the side of the harvester, but then he jumped back and shook his hand. "Found it."
"What's wrong?"
"You've seized a bearing. Feel it." Alex pointed to a ring around one of the shafts, where it disappeared into the body of the harvester.
Derek hesitated, and Alex egged him on. "Go ahead, feel it."
Derek touched the slab of metal that the ring, the bearing, was mounted in. It was very hot to the touch.
"Yeah, the bearing got so hot that the ball bearings inside just melted and seized to the race," Alex said. He might as well have been speaking Greek, as far as Derek was concerned. He sort of knew what it meant to seize, and he knew what a ball bearing was, but what was a race supposed to be?
"That noise you heard was this here," Alex said, pointing to two toothed collars on the shaft, sandwiched between a spring-loaded plate and a pulley. "That's a clutch. When there's too much load on that shaft, it starts slipping and makes a racket."
"So how do we fix it?" Derek asked.
"Gotta go back to the yard," Alex replied. "We can't fix it out here."
"Shit!" Derek breathed. That meant that it wasn't just Alex he'd have to tell about his mistake. His boss, John Roe Sr, the guy who signed the checks every week, would find out. And if the boss found out, then his son would find out, and-
Alex dug into the mound of grease and dirt that hung under the bearing, exposing a grease zerk that Derek couldn't ever remember seeing before.
"You've never greased that, have you?" Alex said.
"I've never seen that before," Derek shot back.
"My fault, then," Alex said. "I should have been checking your work in the morning."
That pissed off Derek, somehow, but he didn't know why. Maybe it was because Alex was always taking the blame for Derek's mistakes, as if Derek was a little child who couldn't think for himself. That one time when Derek had ripped an irrigation meter out of the ground with his machine's header, Alex had taken the blame for not telling Derek to go wide around the irrigation pivot. That one time when he'd plugged up the unloading auger, breaking two sets of shear bolts in the process, Alex had taken the blame for giving Derek bad advice. Derek couldn't even remember what that bad advice was.
It was fucking patronizing, and it never worked. John Roe, Jr, the guy who managed day to day operations on the farm, always took it out on Derek, not Alex.
"I'm going to call Detweiler," Alex said, referring to the farm's mechanic. "Tell him to..."
He'd been walking back to his harvester, but he'd stopped and pointed at the rear axle of Derek's machine. There was a crack there, starting about a third of the way down from the top. At the bottom of the axle, the crack was wide enough that Derek could have stuck the tip of his pinkie finger inside.
"We are going to have to bring this harvester back to the yard very fucking carefully," Alex said. He kicked a furrow. The furrows in this field were tall and widely spaced, and to Derek driving over them had almost felt as if his machine was rattling itself to pieces. In hindsight, it really had been rattling itself apart.
"What was your ground speed?" he asked.
"I don't know, Five point one?" Derek replied.
"My fault," Alex said. "I should have seen that and told you to slow down."
----------------------------------------
Note: This was all typed up on the computer, which is pretty unusual for me. Usually, I have to compose in a notebook far away from an internet connection so that I don't get distracted.
The above is probably not interesting to anybody but me, but it's what came to mind when I realized that I needed something to write. And I got 1,371 words in before I ran out of steam. I'm not sure if that's a record, but it certainly is phenomenal. I wish I could write like that full time.
He'd been told to keep the volume of the radio down enough that he could hear his machine running, but it was long, boring work driving a harvester back and forth across a dryland field. He needed something, anything to keep his mind occupied, and besides, listening at half volume was no way to listen to rock music.
But the radio got boring after a while, so Derek slipped on an earbud and listened to music piped from his phone. But he'd gotten home late last night and forgot to charge the phone, and the battery drained before lunchtime. So he went back to the radio, and he was tuning from one satellite channel to another when he heard the noise. It was a squealing sound, and for a moment he hoped it was just static. Static that wasn't coming the speakers in the cab, somehow.
Then there came a rattling, hard and loud, from somewhere in back of the machine. With a yelp, Derek yanked the speed control stick back and throttled down the engine, but the noise persisted. Frantically, he started flipping switches on his console one by one until the noise finally quit.
The dry heat of the summer day blasted into the cab the moment Derek opened the door and climbed out. It was a sharp contrast to the air conditioned interior, but he barely noticed. He did notice the sticker on the windshield that said G.O.A.L., and that was because he usually ignored it too.
Those letters stood for Get Out And Look. If he heard something suspicious, or saw something suspicious, he was supposed to get out of the harvester and take a look. Most of the time he just eyeballed the trouble from the driver's seat, and it worked nine times out of ten.
That tenth time, and there had been so many tenth times, he'd broken something expensive.
Derek dropped down into the golden wheat and waded around the harvester to the right side, where he'd thought he'd heard the noise come from. But standing there in the clear-cut wheat, he couldn't spot anything wrong.
The harvester combine was a twenty-ton articulated machine that scooped wheat up one and and spit straw and chaff out the other. Somehow, grain was separated out and poured into the bulk tank up top. Derek under stood the theory of what it all did, barely, but he didn't understand how it worked.
The outside of the harvester was a cluttered mess of belts, pulleys, driveshafts, and chains, and most of it was buried under plastic guards. Oh, and there were grease zerks. About a hundred of them, all of which had to be greased first thing in the morning. Frankly, Derek didn't understand what any of them did. Something was broken, but he didn't know where to look.
He had to call for help. Which meant that he had to admit he'd broken something, yet again.
Derek climbed back into the cab and tried to start the harvester again, but it made that awful racket. Finally, he pulled the walkie-talkie off the sun visor and called the other person working the field.
"Alex, my machine's making a funny noise."
After a long time came the reply.
"What?"
"My machine is making a weird noise. It's like a rattling sound."
There was another long pause.
"I'll be there in a few minutes."
================================
After about ten minutes, the other combine in the field finally caught up and parked alongside Derek's machine. The driver got out of his cab and climbed around the upper deck to get a closer look. "What's wrong?"
"Down here, on the other side," Derek called back.
Alex climbed down from his harvester and waded around to where Derek was standing. Unlike Derek, Alex was bearded, white, and he wore prescription safety glasses. "You said it was a rattling sound?"
"Yeah."
"That could be anything," Alex said. "You find the problem yet?"
"No, that's why I called you."
"Was it a regular sound, or was it like a hammering, or-"
"Not a hammering. It was fast."
"Fast. Like a hammer drill?"
Derek shot Alex a look. "What's that?"
"OK," Alex said. "The noise stopped when you shut off the separator?"
Alex wasn't sure what all the separator was, but he knew which switch in his cab controlled it. "Yeah. It stopped almost immediately after I stopped the separator."
"Right," Alex said. "I assume that it wasn't the upper sieve banging against the frame of the combine, because that would be expensive as-
He'd been probing around the side of the harvester, but then he jumped back and shook his hand. "Found it."
"What's wrong?"
"You've seized a bearing. Feel it." Alex pointed to a ring around one of the shafts, where it disappeared into the body of the harvester.
Derek hesitated, and Alex egged him on. "Go ahead, feel it."
Derek touched the slab of metal that the ring, the bearing, was mounted in. It was very hot to the touch.
"Yeah, the bearing got so hot that the ball bearings inside just melted and seized to the race," Alex said. He might as well have been speaking Greek, as far as Derek was concerned. He sort of knew what it meant to seize, and he knew what a ball bearing was, but what was a race supposed to be?
"That noise you heard was this here," Alex said, pointing to two toothed collars on the shaft, sandwiched between a spring-loaded plate and a pulley. "That's a clutch. When there's too much load on that shaft, it starts slipping and makes a racket."
"So how do we fix it?" Derek asked.
"Gotta go back to the yard," Alex replied. "We can't fix it out here."
"Shit!" Derek breathed. That meant that it wasn't just Alex he'd have to tell about his mistake. His boss, John Roe Sr, the guy who signed the checks every week, would find out. And if the boss found out, then his son would find out, and-
Alex dug into the mound of grease and dirt that hung under the bearing, exposing a grease zerk that Derek couldn't ever remember seeing before.
"You've never greased that, have you?" Alex said.
"I've never seen that before," Derek shot back.
"My fault, then," Alex said. "I should have been checking your work in the morning."
That pissed off Derek, somehow, but he didn't know why. Maybe it was because Alex was always taking the blame for Derek's mistakes, as if Derek was a little child who couldn't think for himself. That one time when Derek had ripped an irrigation meter out of the ground with his machine's header, Alex had taken the blame for not telling Derek to go wide around the irrigation pivot. That one time when he'd plugged up the unloading auger, breaking two sets of shear bolts in the process, Alex had taken the blame for giving Derek bad advice. Derek couldn't even remember what that bad advice was.
It was fucking patronizing, and it never worked. John Roe, Jr, the guy who managed day to day operations on the farm, always took it out on Derek, not Alex.
"I'm going to call Detweiler," Alex said, referring to the farm's mechanic. "Tell him to..."
He'd been walking back to his harvester, but he'd stopped and pointed at the rear axle of Derek's machine. There was a crack there, starting about a third of the way down from the top. At the bottom of the axle, the crack was wide enough that Derek could have stuck the tip of his pinkie finger inside.
"We are going to have to bring this harvester back to the yard very fucking carefully," Alex said. He kicked a furrow. The furrows in this field were tall and widely spaced, and to Derek driving over them had almost felt as if his machine was rattling itself to pieces. In hindsight, it really had been rattling itself apart.
"What was your ground speed?" he asked.
"I don't know, Five point one?" Derek replied.
"My fault," Alex said. "I should have seen that and told you to slow down."
----------------------------------------
Note: This was all typed up on the computer, which is pretty unusual for me. Usually, I have to compose in a notebook far away from an internet connection so that I don't get distracted.
The above is probably not interesting to anybody but me, but it's what came to mind when I realized that I needed something to write. And I got 1,371 words in before I ran out of steam. I'm not sure if that's a record, but it certainly is phenomenal. I wish I could write like that full time.