Today it's back to school for a little continuing education at the University of
Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers men's hockey team.
I'm Roger.
Mike. Nice to meet you, Mike.
How are you? Roger I'm very good, thanks.
How you doing, Mike?
Scott But I'm not here to puck around.
I'm here to learn all I can about the business of maintaining escalators.
You just don't expect to see a turkey guarding the door to a stadium.
Looks like he's going to let us go.
Mike, You know, Turkey was almost our national bird.
John Adams wanted the eagle.
Thomas Jefferson wanted a dove.
Really? Yeah. But Franklin wanted the turkey.
A truly noble bird, he said.
Franklin had a point.
I guess I'm glad it's not the national bird.
We wouldn't be able to eat them, right?
Oh, well, this is a little closer than I anticipated.
Yeah, this is nice, right?
We find ourselves in front of an escalator that's been turned off for safety, I'm sure.
Can't clean them when they're moving.
That'd be highly dangerous.
Yeah. This escalator is inspected every month, but the service we're doing today is
performed once a year or as needed.
How long is this going to take?
I think we're going to take most of the day.
We have to pull some steps so we can get into the top end and the bottom.
Once we got the top end cleaned, we're going to clean the bottom in and then we'll get it
back running again.
Have you been into many dirty bottoms yourself, Scott?
Several dirty bottoms?
Yep.
Will we be wiping the bottom?
We will wipe the bottom.
Okay, so we have to go up top and get the power turned on.
So I guess we're heading upstairs.
Yep. All right. So we're going to lift, right?
And now we're going to take it.
And now we're going to slide it back.
All right, so now we got to power up.
This is the disconnect right here.
Right here, Mike.
So this is simply the mechanism that allows the thing to start moving, right?
This gives the controller voltage and we got to get geared up because these have blown up
in the past. So we take a lot of safety measures to prevent that from happening.
Why would they blow up?
They must be going to ground somewhere because everything is grounded.
So if there is voltage going through there, that that will trip the breaker.
But we've seen a lot of videos where someone goes to turn the disconnect on and it just
shoots this blast of tremendous heat and it usually kills the person or burns them.
They're burnt bad. So.
You know, there are some rules that we have to follow to start staying as far away from
danger as possible.
Sure.
The inherent risk of maintaining an escalator is is truly a hazardous.
Oh, it's.
True. Oh, very much so, Mike.
Yeah, There are inherent dangers.
Slips and trips, electrocution, you know, getting caught up in it.
So, okay.
I brought you some PPE, earplugs, gloves, forearm covers.
When you turn the power on, we all kind of look away and move a safe distance.
Okay, so you're kind of on your own at that point.
You're freaking me out, Roger.
But these are.
All the things that you don't think of until you're part of it.
Until you're suddenly going up like flash paper.
Right. And.
And earplugs.
Yeah, because it can boom.
What's that do?
It's So you don't conduct electricity.
Oh, so this will sort of ground me.
Unground you.
We would never want to be directly over the top of the disconnect, right?
So you just want to reach over.
Stay out of the way and just turn it on.
Pull it on.
Just like this? Yep.
Turn it like this. Yep.
And the odds of this exploding are very low.
Very low. But it.
Could happen. It could happen.
This could be the shortest segment in the history of dirty jobs.
We're going together.
All right, I'm going to turn it this way.
Well done.
That's it. That's it. Well done.
We're still here.
Power is now. We made it.
It's on. Yeah. All right.
So what does that mean?
So now we're going to transfer it down to the bottom.
Yeah, and then we'll be taking some steps out.
Do we go down the escalator?
Do we take the stairs? We'll take the.
Stairs.
Okay. You could say that repairing and working on escalators is a step by step
process. Many steps.
So have you ever pulled an escalator step out?
I haven't.
Now, this is a this is a new one for me.
I did the elevator thing.
That's me in an elevator shaft.
100% certain that Dirty Jobs would not be on the air 16 years later.
Wrong.
We're going to lift it up.
Yep. All right.
And then I'll kind of kick that.
Now we're going to slide her back.
Yep. So now what we're going to do is we're going to run this thing.
This goes inside here and we relock it, and we got to stop.
Button here.
That's a stop button.
Yep. Before I run, I always bail her out.
Going up like four.
On the golf course. Exactly.
Going up escalators in environments like this going up can see as many as 8000 riders
in a single day.
And then here.
Comes the whole we came here and pulled out a few steps yesterday, but we wanted to leave a
few for you to pull. Well, thanks.
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
And that's the whole I'll be dropping into assuming Taylor doesn't drop in first trying
to get the shot. Do we get in there?
You know.
Mike, I think for this first part here, I think we will get in there.
Okay. We're going to be shoulder to shoulder, if that's all right with you.
Sorry.
With me. Belly to belly, Cheek to jowl.
Yeah.
It doesn't bother me a bit.
You, you and me. All two of us together in the pit.
Sounds great.
The escalators mechanism is locked in place before anybody climbs inside.
Can I touch like this?
You can. I can.
Touch anything.
There's really no easy way to get in.
That was perfect.
Thanks. Remember we talked about Simone Biles?
That was. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, if she were here, she'd flip around, boom, and stick the landing.
Stick the landing. Here I come.
Here it comes. This ought to be great, Mike.
We now need to switch sides.
Let's do it.
Which way are you going?
I'm going to go this way.
Scott Bumper.
Good man. Well done, Mike.
Thanks. Nice transfer.
Thank you. So now all we need to remove the steps.
You just loosen these off.
Pull it out? Yep.
And then you just hoist it out.
Just like that. Up to Roger.
There you go, Roger. Thanks, Mike.
There's a step for you.
So now we're going to get out of the pit.
I feel like.
We just got in the pit. Scott Well, we did.
We'll take the stairs. We get in the pit, we get out of the pit, we'll do the thing, we'll
loosen it up. We'll grab the thing, we'll hoist it out, get back in the pit.
We'll do it again.
A few times. We're going to burn some calories here.
I can use it.
You? I'm not saying anything.
And here I was feeling guilty that I skipped leg day.
So in my head now, man, I'm ready for this thing to turn on.
In spite of all of our precautions going up There you go.
Up, up.
And there felt like a little bit more.
A little bit more up.
Yeah, a little bit more up.
Good. Perfect.
Great, perfect. Good.
Get back in the pit. Not yet, No.
Nope. Oh, you got to.
Turn this up. I'll have to verify each stop switch.
Right.
So I'm going to push this down.
Yep.
Try to run it up or down?
Up, down. Nothing.
This goes down too, Right?
Okay, so now this one goes down and that one comes up.
Got to write down.
This comes up now we double check here.
Up. Nope. Nothing down.
Nope, nothing there. So we just leave it all as it is or this goes back down.
So check that. Now, obviously we're both in the run position, but let's go ahead and go
ahead and press that this down.
Yep. Great. And we'll press this, of course, verified both of our switches.
Now we get back in the.
Pit, Now we get back in the pit.
Only you're going to go by yourself.
Okay?
I'll miss you.
I'll miss you, too.
Well, that just got weird, huh?
You're just doing one side at a time.
There you go. Yep. Just like that.
There we go. So the step is free.
Now The step is free.
And now I hand this to Roger.
There you go. Well done.
Well done. That's enough steps.
We're good. Oh, we're good?
Yep, we're good.
Why wouldn't we take out all of the steps?
Because once we rotate the escalator up to the upper end, we're going to get enough open
area that we can begin our clean down.
I got it. I said I got it as though I got it, but I don't.
A lot of times, Scott, I'll nod my head.
I was going to say, You're looking at me like you got it right.
But I don't every day.
Mike Every day. Right.
But you don't really you don't really understand it.
You're just going, Oh, yeah, yeah.
So you're floating along.
Mike Right on par with normal apprentices.
When I worked for Roger, I said, Yeah, I got it.
Yeah, a lot.
Yeah, but you didn't.
You didn't really know.
But you knew that eventually you would.
I had to sooner or later.
Understanding is not negotiable, and you can't really fake it till you make it because
the stakes are too high and safety is what it is.
That's correct. You as a supervisor need to look into the eyes of The Apprentice and ask
yourself, does this guy really understand or is he just nodding his head in bovine
agreement?
Right. Yeah.
Dangerous side.
There comes a time in every job when you just need to do it.
Are you ready? Yeah.
All right. We're going back up the stairs.
We're going up. For the record.
We're not quite there yet, but we're getting close, so.
So I turn away.
All right, I'm going to turn this now.
I hope there's not going to be an explosion.
Powers off. We're locked off, but we're going to treat it like it's hot.
So now we're going to remove that and just lay it back.
Okay. Before I can start work under the track, more safety precautions need to be
taken to ensure that the steps don't move while I'm under them.
Because that would be bad.
Unspeakably bad.
Obviously that's where all the power is, right?
My Roger is coming up the steps for maybe the 300th time today.
He's carrying some straps.
The brake is going to do its job.
It's going to hold the unit.
The straps are just redundancy.
We've got to make sure it's not going to move.
You can say that again.
We got to make sure it's not going to move.