You might be a plant maintenance engineer if…

• You’re the designated plant jailee for all environmental compliance problems
• You’re the first person the plant manager calls whenever anything goes wrong
• You’re on call 24 hours a day and are required to live within 15 minutes of the plant
• You’re in a meeting and you instinctively reach for your belt whenever someone else’s beeper goes off
• You can balance the office temperature to everyone’s satisfaction
• You’re on a first name basis with the OSHA inspector
• You spend more time out of your office than in it
• You’re the only person that really knows where the pipes are buried, regardless of what the drawings show
• Your son or daughter is the only kid on the block that knows that a transformer isn’t just a toy advertised on Saturday morning TV
• You’re the one that gets chewed out for a leaky roof, even though your boss wouldn’t authorize the repair expenditure last year
• You’re the only member of plant management that doesn’t take vacation during the annual shutdown
• You think “holidays” are a management scheme to give you time to perform overdue maintenance
• There aren’t enough days in a year to take all the compensatory time off your boss has been promising
• You know the difference between a motor and an engine
• You know that “power transmission” isn’t the opposite of a stick shift in your car
• You can explain that “busway” isn’t the routing of public transportation past your plant
• You have actually developed an emergency preparedness plan
• You are responsible for keeping everything in the plant running at or beyond design capacity, even though you have neither the authority nor the budget to make it happen
• You have to be able to climb higher and crawl lower than any other executive in your plant
• You’re the only plant executive that thinks PMS stands for Preventive Maintenance System

By Richard L. Dunn