It is an endlessly stereotyped mantra of corporate America: you, as a worker, are part of a whole; a gear in the machinery; a cog in the wheel. For the system to work, you have to do your part, and no matter how insignificant you may think your part is, if you do not do it, everyone will be set back because of it. Hyperbole? Absolutely. But the idea does touch on a key point here at McMurdo (even though it may not be true back in the states), which is that each and every job here exists because it is important. Every person at McMurdo is employed for the sole purpose of supporting scientific research on the harshest continent in the world. There is no other reason for being here. The NSF grantees, the construction workers, the shuttle drivers and the dining attendants all work to advance the knowledge of mankind. Even though the company that employs us (Raytheon) is here for the money, at the very top this venture has no profit motive.

My little part to play in this adventure is as a shuttle operator. My job can be broken down into several aspects, but at its core I am a taxi driver, driving people and their supplies around McMurdo, to the airplane runways and to the nearby science stations. Like most employees at McMurdo, I am housed at a building that is meant to be functional and nothing more:

 This warehousy-looking building is as 140. It’s home to the shuttles department. It also houses the air services department, all of cargo handling, the central supply room and the mail room. If you follow me I’ll take you on a tour of the little corner reserved for shuttles. Up those stairs and through the door in the white patch you’ll enter our building’s welcoming lobby

Cushy, huh? When people arrive at McMurdo, the cargo department unloads the luggage into this area, and passengers can pick it up and be driven to their dorms (by us!). The shuttles office is the door to the left. No, not the door you can see, that’s the ladies’ room. Our door is to the left of that one, mostly obscured by the cubby-holes. No matter, I’ll show you in.

And if you come with me to the other end of the room, we can turn around and see where we’ve been.

Thanks for taking the tour!

We don’t exactly have a lot of space to work with. We also have 27 shuttle drivers, so fitting even half of them into our office is a tight fit, but it can be done in a pinch. Of course, most of the time most of the drivers are out in vehicles doing tasks about town, so office space isn’t a high priority. Our jobs range from being town courier, to shuttling people to the runway, to taxiing people around town and out to various field stations. At the heart of the operation is the dispatcher, keeping track of all the drivers currently on shift, what vehicles they’re driving and where they are. Here we can see Shuttles Mike working hard at it.

You can see around Mike many of the things he’s responsible for. Right now he appears to be taking a call, recording a taxi run and composing an email message for a vehicle heading into an area that requires authorization. Oh, and he’s probably listening to the dispatch radio for updates on road conditions or driver status-es. Basically, he takes in information from emails, the radio, the phones and the flight boards, and dispenses tasks to the drivers via the radio and the Big Board, which tells where every driver and every vehicle we have are at any given moment. 

Dispatcher is a high-pressure task. It is simultaneously awesome and nerve racking. Multi-tasking is an essential skill, and I can thank all those video games I played growing up for being able to juggle those tasks, micromanage effectively and adjust on the fly. The part  that kills me is dividing my attention. As a dispatcher, I have to sometimes be taking a phone call, listening to a flight report on the radio and telling a driver where I need him to go at the same time. Oh, and often there are 6 or 7 other people in the office who may be having other conversations. Anyone who knows me knows I am terrible at focusing on voices in the crowd, and dividing my attention in general, so this part of dispatching is going to prove to be the most challenging.

But dispatching is only one task. And as I said before, most of our time is spent with our vehicles. Let me show you our fleet. We have 17 vans

3 airporters

3 deltas

Ivan the Terra Bus

And 2 prototype vehicles, which are useless without their comically long trailers

The prototypes have a funny story, at least if you consider $4 million dollar prototypes that have been sitting unused for months and months funny. Effectively, they have proven unable to pull themselves and their trailers up hills, and their designers are… reluctant… to send a troubleshooter to figure out why. So for now they languish as roadside derelicts, and are the target of many unflattering comments by passers-by.

Ivan, on the other hand, is a beast. It holds 50+ people and is so unwieldy that a special position, Heavy Vehicle Operator, exists for people qualified to drive it. Alas, I am not one of those people, so I do not get to operate Ivan. I DO get to operate the deltas, though, and they are a nice consolation prize. They hold 20 passengers, are mini-beasts, and have articulating midsections which allow a driver to make absurdly tight turns. They are a handful to drive, but a lot of fun as well. Their big drawback is that they are not a particularly smooth ride, as captured in this cartoon:

Since we’re still in training, I’ll save talking about our job tasks for another day (i.e. once I have a better idea of what they’re like), but these are the places and vehicles I’ll be doing those tasks in.

Other thoughts:

–It has taken me almost two weeks to understand why my sense of direction has failed me and why I’m always confused about where the sun is. Being so close to one of the Earth’s pole, I knew that darkness would never really fall during my time here. And I also knew that a much larger fraction of the horizon would find the sun above it: in the states, the sun rises in the vicinity of east and sets in the vicinity of west, spanning a little over 180 degrees of horizon as the day unfolds. But near the pole, even before everlasting daytime, I came expecting closer to 270 degrees (75%) of the horizon to have the sun passing over it. What confused me was how every morning the sun seemed to rise in what I thought was roughly the easterly direction, but moved northerly instead of southerly in its trip across the sky.

Of course, that exactly what’s supposed to happen: I’m in the southern hemisphere! The sun traverses the southern half of the sky in the U.S. because the U.S. is in the northern hemisphere. Now that I’m in Antarctica, after the sun rises it swings around the northern half of the sky. This took me 2 weeks to work out… and I’m supposed to be an astronomer.

— While most of the experience has been enjoyable, there is one incredibly irksome thing that I have to complain about: my useless friggin’ smartphone-turned-mp3 player. It holds a whopping 8 GB of data which I gleefully filled with music, dreaming of hooking it up to an FM transmitter and blasting tunes during my long drives. Having dumped over half of my laptop’s library there, I set about organizing playlists so that I had my options open depending on my mood and the audience in the vehicle (I don’t want to be offending anyone’s potentially delicate sensibilities). But I noticed a strange phenomenon: sometimes my phone would complain about being unable to play a song which it had just successfully played.

No problem, right? I mean, I have something on the order of 5 continuous days worth of music stored, so a missing song here or there I can live with. Sadly, it’s worse than that: huge chunks (90%) of the library go missing seemingly without reason, and when they do my playlists – and all the time and effort put into organizing them – go as well. If I can’t get this fixed, it could be a very big pain in my neck.

Next week: Dorms ‘n Dining