Top 2 funniest moments
One day just when I was heading back to the locker room in the mill to head home for the day, I feel my phone ringing. It is my friend who also was working as a summer student, I was super curious to why she would be calling me as we would be seeing each other in the locker room in about 5 minutes. I answer and she says, “Can you please come to stores I am locked in”, I laugh and head over there. I got to the door and was laughing so hard and thought “what an idiot”. I walked up all confident thinking I could open the door. Little did I know the door was also locked from that side too. So here we are, both pulling on these doors and most likely looking ridiculous. I was starting to think “I will have to go get someone I have no clue why the doors won’t open”. Then a nice worker comes up and informs us that they lock the doors after 3:30 and you either need a need a key or you must press the button right by the door. We felt so silly, but we still love telling people this story.
During my first summer I worked in production on the rip line which included painting, wrapping and strapping bundles to be ready for shipment. When you paint the bundles, you paint with a spray gun attached to the ground. Somehow one day the nozzle where the paint came out got turned to the side. With that being said me and my other coworker did not realize this until she went to paint the bundle and it sprayed sideways and got me right on the side on my face and neck! We both were just shocked and looked at each other in disbelief for 10 seconds then busted out laughing. After that we always made sure the nozzle was facing forward!
Top 3 Favourite Tasks
It is not often when all the summer students get to do a job together. The one time we all got to it might not have been the most fun job out there, but we definitely made the best of it. During our first week of work in summer 2022 they needed us summer students to pick up garbage outside around the mill and in the ditches. Needless to say, none of us were excited at first besides the fact they told us we would get pizza for lunch. They got us all our supplies for picking garbage, got us into pairs and gave us walkie talkies. Shortly after we started, we used the walkie talkies to make some jokes and make picking up garbage slightly better! Another thing that made it more enjoyable was once we started, we realized we would be seeing some interesting garbage. Instead of just being grossed out by this we decided to try and joke about it. All thought picking up garbage is not the best job it is one of my favorite tasks I have done at the mill. We all made the best of it and made jokes and tons of laughs were exchanged!
When I was in my first year like said above, I worked on the ripline, however part way through August I was taken off the rip line along with other summer students to do little tasks to improve the mills appearance. We did a few little jobs, but our main focus was painting the doors. The doors were already painted blue however they were a darker blue, so we painted them Tolko blue! This task was not my favourite task at the beginning. Once me and the other summer students got the groove of it, we enjoyed it quite a bit. Since this is all our first summer at Tolko, we enjoyed getting to know each other more and learning how everyone’s summer was since we all worked in different areas. We had lots of fun painting and of course lots of jokes and laugh. I enjoyed seeing the end results and noticing how the doors looked much better after they were painted!
All though I do enjoy most of the tasks I have been given throughout my 3 summers positions at the mill my favorite task is being apart of trials in the lab. I find it very interesting to be a part of trials and to see the end results after I did some of the work to receive the results. The main trials I participate in are improving screening optimization. This includes first changing the roll speed and angels of the primary screens. Then collecting samples from the surface layer chute, core later chute and super screen chute. Once the samples are collected, I do sieve analysis. Sieve analysis is where I first take the sample weight before to get the total weight. Second, I put the sample in the machine then turn it on and let it shake. While the sieve machine shakes it separates the sample into what layer they are, either surface, core or fines. Lastly after it is done shaking and separating, I weight each layer. Doing this process, it gives us accurate data of how much percentage of each layer is in the sample. After all that I enter the data into a excel sheet. My favourite part is entering the data and seeing what the results are and if changing the speed and angel is helping!
