I think I was handed my chance on a silver platter this weekend.

My water manager has been talking for a couple of years about making our contract position a regular job. The site’s expanding and there’s a ton of retrofitting to be done, and it’s becoming a full-time job, which he doesn’t have time for. He’s been handing more and more of it to me, and I’ve stepped right up and done it all. Each time I get a job done well, my reward is more work, and that’s escalating.

I’ve been teasing him about writing the job description for the position he talks about, which I know he’s working on. Well, half-teasing anyway. He tells me that I’m the one he wants to fill the position, but that it’ll have to go out to open bid. Well, of course it will; this is a government agency.

I keep telling him that if he wants to make me bullet-proof, to throw in some requirements about the environmental side of the site, which is my rapidly expiring day job. It does make sense to make someone accountable for knowing about those issues, and while the water operator isn’t a normal sort of category for that sort of person, they’re not making any other new positions any time soon. Since the place has recently completely transferred, they’re going to have to throw the environmental stuff in someone’s lap, and it might as well be mine.

So on Friday, amidst other conversation, he dropped the bomb that he wanted me to provide him with some language to put in the job description. Language regarding potential environmental responsibilities. Well, how about that? I got a good chunk all written up and emailed off to him on Saturday, and we’ll see where he goes with it.

The one thing that gives me a little guilt about this is Big Jeff’s role. Our contract’s up in July, and they’re planning on hiring to replace that, which will cut him out of a big chunk of money while he’s gone (if he’s still gone then, and we don’t know yet if that will be the case.) My rational side says not to feel too guilty about it. After all, we did discuss the possibility before he left. He said he’d compete for the position too, and I wouldn’t feel at all bad about going head-to-head with him in that situation. After all, my day job is going away and I have a family to feed. He’s got a perfectly viable job to come home to. It just feels a little underhanded; one the one side, I’m expanding our business by doing a lot of consulting under our current contract, but on the other hand, I’m working our contract out of existence.

The other part of the chance the manager gave me was more of a hand in retrofitting our site. He’s been picking my brain about backflow preventers for some time now, and I do know my shit about those, but this time he wanted advice on meters. We’re going to put them in the whole place, and I’ve never worked with them.

He wanted a complete recommendation on sizes, types, brands, and prices. By today. But, of course, my one and only text book that has anything about meters in it has disappeared, and none of my vendors publish prices online or are open to call on the weekend. I was amazed by how little was findable on the web, even with hours of looking. So I ordered myself a good chunk of reference manuals, wrote up a preliminary recommendation outlining what we need to look at specifically, and asked for more time. I think I did a decent job of it, considering that what he’d asked for wasn’t exactly something that I could produce on such short notice.

What really amazes me though, is this opportunity to develop this site from scratch. Most water systems are cobbled together as sites expand and as things break or money becomes avalable to upgrade. Almost all of them are composed of mismatched parts and developed from mismatched policies. I’m getting the chance, and as a relatively junior operator no less, to have my hand in developing policy and getting everything working from one base point. I’m planning it as if it’s my own system already. I may be jumping the gun with that, but it’s the best way to work, and it may be mine for the next twenty years. I want to design the best system I can while I have the chance to make suggestions.

So, expect more water geekery in the near future. I’m doing a lot of homework for the site, and it’s riding pretty high up in my head.