Operator at night and his second job

🕵️‍♂️ Surveillance sees everything: Operator at night and his second job

Saved: Wednesday, 02:43 am - The treatment plant is sleeping, the bacteria are working, and on the monitoring ... someone is dancing with the recirculation pipe.

Every treatment plant has one such night operator. Quiet, punctual, too polite during the day, too active at night. In our case, it was Romek. Romek looked like a man who knew all the keyboard shortcuts in SCADA and none in real life. Until.

📹 Night shift and disappearing mop.

Night duty is usually boring. Unless something blows up, all you can do is glance at the charts, drink coffee and pretend to read the blower manual. But something had been wrong for some time.

• At night, the mop disappeared.
• A flashlight was missing from the cantina.
• And in the retention basin was found... a ring light.

The manager thought they were thieves. Halina from the laboratory - that a ghost. And Staszek concluded that "it's probably Romek again." And he was right.

📲 TikTok from anaerobic

The truth came to light when an IT specialist was doing a system update and accidentally played back camera footage from recent months. Romek appeared on the screen, who:

• set the tripod on the discharge line,
• He said to the camera: "Hello, today I'm going to show you how to clean the valve without touching it... almost."
• and danced by the grease separator with a coffee filter on his head.

It turned out that Romek ran the TikTok channel at night "@BioHackerWastewater"., where he posted lifehacks for operators, type:

"How to recognize fermentation by smell."
"What to do when the pH sensor is offended."
"Toilet cube and activated sludge - a banned experiment."

🚨 Intervention and the end of a career (almost)

When the manager found out about the case, Romek was called "on the carpet." He came with a tablet and said that he "did it out of passion and for the industry." He showed the statistics: more than 120,000 impressions. Someone wrote that Romek is a "garbage influencer 2025."

He was not reprimanded. He got... official permission to record - but on the condition that he tapes the treatment plant logo and doesn't upload anything from the locker room.

- Romek, but it was my mop," said Staszek.
- Staszek, your mop has gone viral," replied Romek proudly.

📱 Moral for today's times

Every treatment plant has cameras. But not every one has Romek. If you see an LED light in a biological reactor at 3:00 in the morning, it's not necessarily a failure. It could be content.

☕ Put up coffee for the night operators!

If you're smiling - drop by buycoffee.to/wastewatertales and leave a drop of caffeine for Rom.