Who works with you?

5 Nov 2016

My coworkers are a very interesting mix.  We have ultra-nerdy astrophysicists who sit about discussing what tweaks they've made to their custom compiled linux kernels (that's super nerdy even by my standards), but there are also a lot of blue collar heavy equipment drivers, cooks, dishwashers, plumbers and fuel techs.  There are folks here who have been coming down to one Antarctic station or another for 20 summers bulldozing out the snow drifts or hauling the trash.  I love the mix.  Apparently at McMurdo there’s a bit of contentious class divide between the laborers and some scientists, "beakers," who are too good to mingle.  I'm very happy that Pole tends to be too small to support that sort of thing, and we're much more one team.

We've got a 22 year old physicist who is going to start grad school when he gets off ice, and I had lunch yesterday with an awesome 73 year old utilities tech who is doing his first season down here, fulfilling a lifelong dream.  Our winter site manager is immediately impressive.  He's spent the last 30 years managing small isolated stations on remote Aleutian Islands or tiny coral atolls in the Pacific or Indian oceans.  He spends his vacation time doing overland traverses of Africa and remote pockets of New Guinea.  I have absolute confidence in his ability to manage our group of 50 winter overs.  Our head cook is a giant of a man from North Carolina who goes by "Big Country."  You don't even have to be here to know the food is amazing.  One of his production cooks usually lives in a town of 30 in rural Alaska, mostly living off subsistence hunting and gathering, but working as a chef at a local high end cruise ship resort.

Current station population is 108.  I don't know a precise M/F breakdown, but I would guess 15-20% female.

I know it's barely been a week, but I think I'm really going to like this experience.