"Ivan is an example of diligence and purposefulness, for 40 years he has been faithful to one operation, where his closest colleagues familiarly call him "the owner". He is very reliable, conscientious and humane. During this period, he is a member of teams that solve projects such as Segmentation of NH3 pipelines in DZ SVa, Stable monitoring of ammonia management and others. During his career, he has educated a number of experts, which he can be proud of. It achieves excellent results in the areas of occupational safety, quality and productivity. Ivan has raised 3 successful daughters, two have already graduated from universities and the third is going to study linguistics in September. He was hired by VSŽ as a "locotractor" driver and today we take stock with a smile of what an interesting path he has gone through and developed into a truly trustworthy expert in our divisional plant.  We are glad that he has endured it with us so far  and we hope that he will make us happy for a long time," Peter Fudor , head of the hatch annealing plant, wrote us such an honest and beautiful assessment  about his colleague Ivan Čurilla , who received the Work Loyalty Award on Friday.

Ivan Čurilla's work is very specific. He works as a production foreman in a mixing station. It is the production of a protective atmosphere. " In short, we produce hydrogen from ammonia, which is distributed to other plants, where it is used as a protective atmosphere, either as we produce it, i.e. 75 percent hydrogen and 25 percent nitrogen, or we mix it to a ratio of 95 percent hydrogen and 5 percent nitrogen. It's more complicated," he explains, adding: "I started at the annealing plant and went through the whole cycle to the production of the protective atmosphere. At first I thought it would be a short-term affair, and after all, I've been here for 40 years.  The work has been interesting and motivating for me so far, the team in which I work is also important to me."

And he originally wanted to become a train driver... The railways were not accepted, so he decided to pursue university studies and after its early graduation , he somehow naturally headed to VSŽ, where his father and uncle also worked.

We wanted to know if he had ever regretted his decision. " There were moments when I wanted to leave, but the interest of my work always won. We experienced the strongest moments when dealing with emergency situations, power supply outages...  It was always a joy when we managed to save the entire load, when we were able to react in time and promptly, and a little bit even with a small soul, we were always able to keep it so that the operation worked normally," says Ivan Čurilla .

During his work, Ivan raised several excellent operators.  Was it difficult?

" It is a responsible job, very demanding, we have a lot of pipelines in the company, the scope of work is large and it takes at least a year before a newcomer can say that he somehow knows it. However, there are still situations that can surprise. A shortage of energy or raw materials...  And there is a new problem in the world. It is certainly not a routine job. Very often it is necessary to dig into the memory and pull out such knowledge that I did not even know I had," he said.

All his colleagues wish him the Loyalty Award for Work Loyalty. Of course, his whole family is also proud.