I’m at my best when I have a lot going on, as long as it’s something that I can do something about. Give me a series of crises at work, and I can hit my peak performance. Make me juggle two businesses, a job, someone else’s bills, and a sick kid, and I can hit each note at exactly the right time.

Of course, the flip side of that is that I’m not so hot when I have too little to do, or when the main issues in my life are centered around emotional stuff. Sure, I can rebuild your backflow preventer, even if I’ve never seen that brand before, but present me with a problem of the heart, and I just don’t know what to do. Even if the crying person is me, I’m at a loss.

Fortunately, (I guess) this week has been all about things that I can take care of.

I can’t fix Jeff’s dangerous situation, but I sure can take care of things back here for him. If I don’t dwell on where he is and what he’s doing, I’m fine.

I don’t have a lot to do in my day job, but what I have is done well.

Seamus has a sore throat? I know exactly what to do.

And I really got a chance to shine with my business over the last couple of days. We had what could have turned out to be a major public safety incident, in which a valve stem broke on a chlorine cylinder. And it still contained over a hundred pounds of gaseous chlorine, enough to kill off any number of people, first of which in line would have been me, trying to fix it.

My manager for that system was deep into other things, so he dropped it in my lap. Since I’m the operator anyway, that’s appropriate. The County gave me approval to hire whoever I needed to to take care of the situation. So that’s what I did: I called in the vendor and the manufacturer, who helped me correctly diagnose the problem (it was exactly what I had thought it was, and was also an exceedingly rare situation) and came out today to lay their own eyes on it.

I had correctly assumed that if anyone had the equipment to handle live chlorine, it would be the manufacturer. Sure enough, he came out with a steel casing called a coffin, which is designed to slip a faulty cylinder into to contain the gas. Sadly, it wasn’t big enough, as the only valve holding this gas in is on my chlorinator assembly, and that wouldn’t fit into the coffin. We can’t take that off without causing a leak, and we really don’t want to do that if we don’t have to.

So we put it back where it belongs, tied it up all securely, and they’re coming out next week with bigger equipment. Lucky me, I was able to go back to my boss (and his) and give him a summary of what happened, but also what we were doing to contain it and how soon that would be. I’ve been able to rattle contingency plans off the top of my head as if they were written down (and maybe they should be) and I’m going to come out of this smelling like a rose. Good thing my other well came on line last week, or it really would have been an emergency. It also doesn’t hurt that while I was doing this, I ended up diagnosing an operations problem that we didn’t even know we had yet, and even suggested the best solution to the controls guy. Man, I really hope I get credit for that call.

None of this can do anything but make me look good, and to the agency that I really want to hire me.

So if you break your arm or want to be picked up at the airport or need a nice cheesecake recipe or have to have a nice piece of roadkill skinned, I’m your woman. If you’ve been dumped, I’m just going to stand around awkwardly and pat you on the shoulder because I don’t quite know what else to do with you. We all have our strengths, and mine are firmly on the practical side. But what I’m good at, I can be very good at.