crickets

Today started as the rest of the work week had. The alarm went off at 4a.m. I got up, got dressed, got my lunch together and headed out the door at 4:50. The 40 minute drive to town was much like the other ones had been, me fighting to keep from falling asleep, trying to see only 4 lanes on the road. At several points during said trip I was seeing as many as 8 lanes, not an auspicious start to a Thursday.

I was working on the boom line, so I knew I wouldn't be required to do a whole lot of thinking, thank gawd. We have 5 areas we rotate through on the line: blower, vacuum, shredder, hardware1 and hardware2. I started at the vacuum, then rotated to the blower area. Things seem to find be fine, other than being tired, the day was progressing quickly.

After lunch, I rotated over to the hardware1 area, my co-worker Kathy was on hardware2. This is where I started thinking I was losing my mind. I looked over at her and said "I hear crickets". She looked back at me, and promptly burst out laughing. (not a good sign)
I said "don't you hear those crickets?" She didn't hear anything. So for almost an hour I tried doing my job, hearing those annoying creatures chirping. (this is through mandatory hearing protection mind you)
When we rotated jobs again, I ended up at the shredder, next to my team leader for the day. I look at him and said, "you know, earlier I heard crickets." (at this point I was expecting another person laughing at me) He looked at me and said "yeah, the shredder chirps, but you can only hear it when you're on hardware."
Holyyyyy chit, here I thought I was really over the edge, into total exhaustion, mind shut down, auditory hallucinations tired, but I just have very good hearing it appears.

At 4:30p.m. I headed to my jeep, crawled in and set that sucker to automatic pilot.
(as I write this, I am extremely happy blogspot has spell check, as I'm sure it would not have been legible otherwise)
below is a picture of what we were making today.