Parts cleaning sucks.

I found out what the tub was for.  The first thing that the chief had me do was fill the thing with about five or six gallons of Varsol.  That's some nasty stuff.  It's basically paint thinner, but smellier.  I used it all day to clean engine parts.

The mechanic and the chief began removing parts from the engine.  They put the nuts and bolts into a variety of soup cans and brought the parts over to the tub.  The pile beside me grew.  My only task was to wash the oily sludge off of them in the Varsol, scrubbing them with rags and brushes.  The hardest part of the job was removing the rock hard petrified gaskets using a variety of scrapers and blades.  This is tedious and monotonous work.

The Varsol is sucking the moisture out of my skin.  My wrists itch so bad, it hurts.  I have a thousand cuts and gouges on my hands and fingers; when those sharp scrapers slip off of the parts I'm cleaning, they fly at high speed toward the hand that's holding the part steady.  And my back is destroyed.  I've been sitting on a milk crate the whole time, hunched over that tub.  I didn't take any breaks because I didn't want to listen to the chief bitching about how everyone is so lazy these days.

He complains a lot but he seems to like my work.  He throws a lot of backhanded compliments out whenever he comes over to see what I'm doing.  The mechanic likes my work.  He encouraged me to keep it up, that by doing the "bull work" I was learning all the parts and how they fit to engine.

I'm going to keep it up.  It's only my second day on tugs but I hope we finish this soon.  Parts cleaning sucks.