Working at the DOT was an invaluable experience.  The guys taught me more than I thought I could, challenged me beyond my limits, and most importantly showed me how to keep that shovel from falling over.  Total hours for March are a whopping 48.  Been spending the last few weeks working back some of this intern debt I've accrued this quarter.  My PC is kind of on the fritz right now so I can't post pictures, but we had quite the incident with one of the drivers not doing a very thorough walk-around on one of the sanding trucks.  He failed to notice one inch rust streaks going outwards from the lug nuts on the driver side rear wheel.  However, he didn't fail to notice the wheel go past him on the freeway when the bolts broke off.  Pretty interesting there.  I don't imagine I will ever forget to look at and check the torque on my wheels if I start driving truck.

I went back into the shop yesterday to make sure everything hadn't fallen into chaos in my absence and received an update on the Broce sweeper.  After I had the rear brakes all put back together they were still quite tight.  We went ahead and replaced the emergency brake pedal on my last day because it was binding up.    I left with the sweeper still hanging from the lift.  Apparently what had happened was that Broce sent us the wrong shoes.  They were not quite the right curve angle for our drums.  Took them awhile to figure that out.  I guess what led them to that was that the top and bottoms of the pads themselves were shining after installing and spinning the wheel.  Indicating the obvious:  wrong curve.  That will always be something I check.  Just simply putting the shoe into the drum is all that's needed that would have saved hours of headache.