Work is getting way harder. For the past week, Griffin and I have been cleaning cooling towers. Cooling towers look like huge, upside-down trapezoid. On the top are massive industrial fans that spin counter-clockwise to create suction through the diagonal sides, which are made of wood planks to funnel the air to the bottom, which is the "cooling" part of "cooling tower." Now, these planks hadn't been cleaned in many, many years. Decades, really. The air is so salt- and mineral-laden that the planks are crusted at least an inch thick. The planks are lined up in ten columns of fourteen. That 140 planks, with anywhere from 1 to 3 inches of salt/mud/algea on them. Now, to encore my second sentence, Griffin and I have been cleaning cooling towers.
It takes about 8 hours to clean 1 side (each tower has 2). Most of the towers are elevated a bit, so the top plank is about 15 ft in the air. The bottom plank is usually about 2 ft off the ground. Right now, you're saying "Now Joe, your blog is at best a mildly-entertaining way to pass the time between the no-activity-zone on Facebook and sleep. Now, you're boring me with this useless information on the height of cooling planks. What's the deal?" Here's the deal. Half of the planks are either head-level or higher, which means Griffin and I spend a fair amount of time each day with our arms over our head, expending enormous amounts of energy from muscles neither us really have while trying to clean these stupid blocks of wood. We generally work for 15 min, stop and complain about how hard the work is, walk around and check our equipment, go fiddle with something that doesn't really need to be fiddled with, stare off into the distance, and then get back to scraping. We also add a few minutes to the beginning and end of each break (there are 3).
During one extended break, we were chatting with a friend of ours named Johnny. Johnny aka "Skinny," has been at CNR in the bagging department for 7 years. He is truly the nicest, most engaging guy we have met here. He is loud, tall, and black as the night. If you ever hang with Griffin, ask him to do the Skinny laugh; he is quite good at it.
Skinny has the gift of gab, so before long Griffin and I were treated to the story of his life. For your sake, I'll start 7 years ago when he started as a temp for CNR, making $7/hour, 7 days a week (he reiterated this several times, plus I had heard it 3 times before. From him.). He had just started dating a white girl (HE specified, I'm just the messenger here...), and they moved in together. He worked as a temp for 5 years, until one fate-filled New Year's Eve party at his house. The cops had received a tip that a drug deal was going down, so the PCed the place ("plainclothsed") with some recording equipment. Looooooooooooooooooooong story short, Skinny got pinned with drug trafficking and thrown in jail. He stayed in jail for 8 months, and turned down a ten-year plea bargain. This got him on trial, and the city was shooting for 99 years. Right as it is about to go to trial, they caught the actual perp (a Mexican) and Johnny was released. He sued the city, won a CRAP ton of money, and then his girlfriend (who was now his common-law wife) broke up with him and took all his stuff. Now she is suing him for "her half" of the settlement. This happened about 2 weeks ago.
I asked my dad about this whole fiasco, and he said that while Johnny was in jail, he never complained once. He did his chores told his jokes, and never made a fuss. He lost over $35,000 in the "divorce," as well as two cars and his house. I asked him how he kept smiling through everything, and he pounded his chest twice, threw up the peace sign, pointed up and said, "The Man upstairs lookin' out for ol' Skinny." He then preceded to tell me about his 80/20 rule (live on 80%, tithe 10%, and save 10%) and how God promised him 70x7. However, he had "not been humble," so God was disappointed in him, and he was showing him how to "get back to humility." He then told about how ho loved his job, this company, and all his co-workers. He puts everything he had into his job because he knows where he came from and he appreciates the "meaningful things in [his] life."
We didn't take anymore breaks, and we finished 1 1/2 towers today.
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