2001-07-11 - 21:42 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Been There

An impacted funny bone seems to be giving me a git of the figgles, comic relief I guess.

In my last job before I retired, in idle moments we would pass notes to each other. Jokes, sarcasms etc.

Mine usually centered around corporate-think.

Attendance Program: They gave it but nobody went.

Incentive Program: Formula by which the company entices employees to hasten their own layoff.

Preventitive Maintenance: Work which is performed on machines to prevent production.

Routine Maintenance: Operations performed after a machine totally self destructs.

Reorganization: Laying off journeymen and replacing them with part timers -- no bennies and low wages.

Humor shows up at odd moments and peculiar situations. I remember a job I had at a freight trailer shop. Mostly repair and lengthening of them. We had a fiesty klutz of a guy there. When he was first hired he bummed/borrowed tools from us until he could buy some of his own. After some unpleasant words from the crew, he finally bought himself a nice, new, red tool box, filled with tools. He loved his stuff, wouldn't loan a piece of it to anyone for any reason. To top it off he got paranoid and thought people were riffling through his stuff, nasty little jerk of a guy.

One day he went out for lunch, while he was gone we pulled a trailer up underneath a cross beam, leaned a ladder from the roof of that onto the beam. One of us got up there and the rest of us emptied his tool box, took it up to the guy on the beam. He got it stabilized and proceeded to pull up the tools, several small buckets full and then put them in their proper places in the top and drawers. He then wrapped the sucker in rope. We took the ladder down, pulled the trailer out and sat down and pretended to be finishing our lunches.

When the horn blew to go back to work, everybody went to where they had been working. I wish a video tape could have been taken of him searching for his tools. He ferreted his way back and forth, round and round the trailers in the shop, went outside and looked in the scrap pile.

'Twas easy to see the head of steam he was building up while trying to figure out who to blame for the disappearance of his tools. He managed to find some kind of work using no tools to last him the rest of the day.

Just at quitting time he spotted his tool box up in the rafters. Then came the big scene, oh man, imagine Donald Duck in one of his jumping up and down, ranting rages with full volume, profane audio. Unconsciously he showed his assery to the max while we, each in an out of the way place watched the fireworks. The quitting horn blew, and we all left the shop. He couldn't persuade any one to help him get the thing back down.

But when we came in the next morning it was sitting in its proper place. He punished the whole group by not speaking to any of us for a little over a week.

He was a source of amusement most of the time, one day he was replacing some inner lining using quarter inch plywood. He took a piece up into the trailer - held it up to the wall, it was about a foot too short I noticed (I was working on the inner liner on the opposite side). He hopped down out of the trailer, pulled the plywood out, went to the table saw and cut a foot of it off. Back up again he held it up to the wall and went into one of his rages. My sides were still sore that night on my way home.

Once he was working with some one by four pine, and acting important to show the boss what a good worker he was, went to the table saw with a piece of the wood, hooked his tape over the end of it, got a sight on the length he wanted -- and proceeded to run the whole thing through the saw, tape and all. He did his usual Donald Duck explosion.

Often on repair jobs it was necessary to use a rivet buster held in a riveting gun to knock the heads off the 3/8 inch aluminum rivets. Then the procedure was to take a hand held punch and punch the rest of the rivets out of their holes using a four pound hammer. His aim was bad and never improved. He had scabs on scabs on the knuckles of his left hand from missing the punch with his hammer. More ranting and swearing ensued.

He was a smart ass, and crusty besides, we all just stood aside and let him mess himself up because he had repeatedly blew off suggestions or help before. I never felt a bit guilty over any of it, and of course I would have jumped in to save him from grave injury but not to keep him from drilling his finger once. Mr. Accident Crusty Prone, Esq.

Around work, factory, industrial or mechanical, opportunities for laughter abounded, teasing and laughing made the day much shorter for us. There was a comradeship between us that shows me one way why membership of a union call each other brothers and sisters.

When working in a test lab once about six pigs were penned at the back of the building. They were to be used in one of the tests. One evening the man in charge of the pigs went in the pen to do his work, the pigs charged through the gate and ran through the open hanger doors, scattering through the shop. Our whole test lab crew was mustered to catch the pigs, so we had a pigdeo chasing them around and around the machines. I still laugh every time I think of it.

We were running a test out on the back apron which sat about ten feet or so higher than the little creek running through the property. A tall movable scaffold was rolled to the edge, blocked and a wire strung and tightened up around a stake at creekside. There was a sheave on the wire to hold a weight and the idea was to let the weight go down the wire and strike the test article. One of the forman's nephews was sent up the scaffold and told to give a count down at the proper time and then release the weight.

There were several super high speed cameras focused on the scene as well as all kinds of instrumentation on everything. The guy got up on the scaffold, got ready and started his countdown - - - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 etc. It was a guessing game for all personnel who were running the measuring equipment as to what number he would reach before releasing the weight. Three of the cameras zorched through the reel of film they were loaded with before anything happened and the fourth was late and missed the boat too. The Twidgets pushed buttons at random it seemed and none of the instrumentation recorded a damn thing. There were many, many more funny things that happened at work, but as a comic once said, "you shoulda Been There." . . . . . . .

Blog