The Union Shuffle.

I've done every kind of shit job.

by Louis Shalako

I’ve worked for unionized employers and I’ve worked for non-union employers.

The differences are not so extreme, but the game is played a little differently.

When I started at Fibreglas Canada, I made it through the ninety-day probationary period and then I was a permanent employee, and the deductions for union dues were there on my paycheque to prove it.

What I didn’t know, was that I was supposed to bid on a packer’s job. That’s how things worked. 

Otherwise I was just temporary. I might have done it once or twice, but somebody with two days more seniority beat me out and got the packer’s job. The next one came up and it was on S-4, the second line in the Wool Plant, and I liked working on S-3 just fine so I didn’t bid on it. Some guy on my crew bid on it and got the job. We were hired the same day. At some point, with guys of equal seniority, they would have gone alphabetically, so who knows, (as I can’t recall his last name.)

That didn’t bother me, as doing the same job, running the same machine, by shop rules I had to be paid the same.

What happens is some guy wants to change shifts. Maybe his buddy lives in the same outlying little town. They could commute together to work and maybe save some gas. They want to be on the same crew as their buddy.

And word gets around.

So some guy with a couple of years seniority bumped me off my shift, and while I had some seniority, a few months at least, I still didn’t have a regular position on any shift.

They didn’t have a damned clue what to do with me! And yet they couldn’t just pay me to show up and hang out all day, either.

What the company did was to put me in something called ‘Fab.’ The little crew in Fab took high-density fibreglass panels and cut them up for special orders. Some of them might have been for the tops of freezers, other sizes might have been for the sides of ovens and home appliances like washing machines and dryers and things like that.

And I still didn’t bid on a job. And why would I, completely clueless as I was. Fab was days only. Our shift rotated through the days of the week, but it was only one shift. In the Wool Plant, they had three eight-hour shifts, on the pipe insulation line and one or two other little divisions, in the acoustic ceiling tile part of the plant for example, they worked two twelve-hour shifts.

Guys will talk and I wasn’t so smart back then, and when some guy came nosing around I probably told him the same story myself, but soon enough I was bumped off of the Fab crew. Yeah, it was the nosy guy who replaced me.

I guess that sucked in some ways, but next I ended up on Aerocor line, which was basically a big roll of soft fibreglass, which we cut at a certain length and bagged up with a big suction machine to make it smaller. It took four guys to run the line, bearing in mind somebody’s always on clean-up or on break or lunch.

I worked a year at Fibreglas, and I ended up with a car, a girlfriend, and an apartment. All that sort of thing.

Eighteen years old, and the job was the last thing in the world I cared about. One day they laid me off and I soon got work at the other little insulation plant in town. The wages were low and the working conditions atrocious. It was non-unionized. Part of the problem was a different product, as white wool was soft and fluffy, and it came apart easily. We hated white wool at Fibreglas, but it was seldom run on the line.

White wool was sticky, it was like cotton batting only looser.

It hung in the air in clouds. I quit after four hours, and yet I stood the itch, the constant prickling of the skin even when you had been away for a few days, well enough over at the other plant.

Fibreglass got in your clothes, your laundry, your bed, it was in your car, it was in the freakin’ sandwiches that you ate.

But the difference between the two plants was that great. A year in one, four hours in the other.

***

In construction, unions divide up the work. They’re pretty jealous, they’re afraid of their rivals across town ‘ripping them off for their work.’

We were in the door business.

I was in the carpenter’s union and my partner was an ironworker. The local agreement stated that when working on an industrial door, you had to have a carpenter and an ironworker.

The carpenter’s union, in the plants, mostly built scaffolding, but that’s another story.

My buddy was senior man, up on a ladder, and he called down for me to get him a big hammer.

I went out to the service truck and when I came back there was some guy there.

He asked me what union I belonged to. I said the carpenters. So then he gave me shit for having a ball-peen hammer in my hands.

He was an iron-worker and he was shop steward of his particular crew, and in his eyes there was great harm in a carpenter holding onto a ball-peen hammer. He went to the construction foreman, and the plant foreman, and he raised a big stink about it. We got called on the carpet and then we had to defend our turf…

In his eyes, I was on his turf and ripping him off, and of course I had only been with the door company for a short time. I hated taking bullshit from people, so I might have said a few things myself.

But that’s what it was like at times.

Now for the non-union story.

I worked for another industrial door company, and it wasn’t unionized. The company founder and father-figure had done some fast talking and gotten some group health insurance, which included dental insurance. 

There were less than twenty employees, one big happy family, right?

At some point the insurance company asked me to go to the dentist to have ‘an assessment.’

They didn’t want to insure someone without knowing anything about him, and while I don’t want to make too much of it, I sort of came from a broken home, and when I got to a certain size no one could make me go to the dentist.

My old man had plagued me to ‘get your teeth all fixed up before you’re eighteen’ and I would no longer be covered. It didn’t mean much to me at the time. Just the old man talking, you know.

Well, my own dentist’s records must have showed I hadn’t been in there in a while.

Some time later, the boss told me that the insurance company didn’t want to cover me. But I had a chipped tooth that might have benefitted from some cosmetic work, and a couple of cavities, and God knows what all the assessment found.

Imagine the position he was in—and I’m not saying he was a bad guy, because in many ways he was a pretty good guy. I always got along well with him, and we never had any problems.

A week or two later I was laid off.

Why? Especially considering that when I went to pick up my last paycheque, he had hired a couple of real bozos, complete dummies to replace me?

But he couldn’t discriminate against me by not providing the exact same benefits that the other employees enjoyed.

What was he supposed to do? What was I supposed to do?

***

Dow Chemical was in town for five or six decades. They had this thing called ‘revamp’ which was a little in-house construction crew. Everybody in town knew the company would hire temporary workers, pay them good money, and then lay them off after 89 days. One day before your probationary period was done.

I got hired, they called me a ‘Carpenter II,’ based on past experience and they paid me something like $14.88 an hour, not bad money for 1984 or ’85. They stuck me with some old guy who kept telling me to slow down! He had one speed, not very fast, and he always had a pocketful of sunflower seeds, which he would chew and then spit out at regular intervals. The way he walked, I called it ‘The Union Shuffle.’

The man had learned how to survive there, but I didn’t. Perhaps that’s for the best. That’s what we’re supposed to think, right?

Yeah, but he was in the union—I just wanted to get in the union, plus the fact that standing around looking busy, or trying to look busy, was never really my thing. I was easily bored and preferred action, even work, to help get through my day.

Sure enough, they laid me off maybe ten or eleven weeks later. Me and another young guy named Pete were off somewhere on our own, and we were literally pretending to work (which should have been our first clue that something was up) when the foreman drove up just after break-time and told us to get in the truck. They had layoff slips all made out for us in the construction office, and then he drove us to the gate and said goodbye.

“No hard feelings, boys. It’s just that work’s a little slow right now.”

One kid I knew got in there full-time. He must have gotten enough weeks for unemployment insurance, and then they must have called him back before the benefits ran out, or he would have been looking elsewhere I’m sure.

He got lucky, as this happened two or three times, and they decided they liked him well enough, and they decided to keep him. And once you’re in, you’re in.

So that’s how it works sometimes, and I can’t quite remember where I drifted after that.

I’ve had all kinds of shit jobs in my life though.

Chalk it all up to experience and move on, that’s all you can do sometimes.

END 

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My First Hyper-text

The moors. (Veleta, Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

A hypertext is a story with multiple endings or multiple story lines. It can also be a portal, one that takes the reader off on some long and involved journey. Hopefully it leads them somewhere new.

It seems to have done so for the author.

In its most complex form it can look like a tree, with all sorts of stand-alone spinoffs branching out in all directions.

The multiple ending version, in fiction, involves alternate storylines breaking off at a given point. Readers reach a certain point in the text and then they have a choice as to which alternative story line they wish to follow.

They don’t even have to read the book the same way twice—the next time they read it they might decide to see how another version of the book turned out. If there are three endings, there is three times the fun in reading it. If the book is a good one, with all sorts of subtexts and little curlicues of smoke going off in all directions, in all three versions, each of which is a unique story, if there are lots of thing implied but left unsaid, it might be beastly interesting as an overall art form. Your main characters change over the story—in three fascinating and different ways.

I’ve wanted to experiment with that for some time, ever since I first heard of it and understood what it was.

I’ve even wondered if I should put factual links in a mystery novel. I first thought of that while doing the research for Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery. If readers could read about Gilles walking across the moors on his summer holiday, and then click on a link that takes them to good pictures and informative articles about the moors, it might help the story to come alive. It would help the reader to visualize the story. The whole thing is just denser in terms of reading material.

It might make the story a richer experience for the reader. Video and music links could be incorporated, and whenever the reader tired of that, they simply return to the story and carry on.

I haven’t brought myself to doing that yet, but writing even the simplest blog post with links out to any supporting material basically covers the whole process in a nutshell.

If you want a text with three endings, you simply write it. The beginning is common, and at the midpoint, there would be bookmarks to another piece of text inserted in the ebook after the ending of version one. 

That process is very simple.

All they have to do is click, and there they go. Next chapter, only it is version two.

There might be two links: all the reader has to do is to keep reading for version one, and there are version two and version three with their alternate endings.

It takes long enough to write a book, so I really haven’t gone after that idea.

However, non-fiction ebooks are a natural for some kind of conscious hyper-writing.

Once I have enough material, of news, views, opinions, commentary, a series of essays or whatever, I will definitely put that plan into operation.

I think that really does qualify as hypertext because it expands the story, non-fiction as it is, and over the course of time our hypothetical story ‘ending’ changes. That’s because an encyclopedic entity like Wikipedia, or any other repository of knowledge, updates and improves its database, so in that sense the story is ever-changing. That’s valid in the context of the modern world, where the pace of progress is so fast that some of what we write is out of date before it is even published.

It is also possible to put a brief note at the end of the book, linked to a website’s contact form, and readers would be able to report a broken link, offer opinions of their own, or interact to some degree with the author.

What’s really interesting is that readers can follow up a link, add their comments to the site or story, and advance the story on their own initiative, outside of the actual book. The book is a link or portal to offshoots beyond the control of the author. If someone has special knowledge or a unique perspective, then the work will go beyond the writer’s original vision and continue evolving over time. If you don’t agree with Wiki, you can sign up to edit the original material, give citations, and just advance the sum of human knowledge in general!

In a hyper-text, the links take the place of footnotes. In a hard copy book, the reader would have to option to search online or go to a physical library or bookstore in order to check out the references and source materials. Assuming the author ever decided to produce a non-fiction hardcover or paperback book, the hyper-links would become footnotes and reference notes in the back of the book.

It seems like a reasonable experiment, and it also involves new skills. Now the author must think in those hyper-textual terms: good links, good writing, good pictures, and from the perspective of the artist, it has to be coherent. It can’t be all ragged in places because you couldn’t find a good link.

It is a matter of the thing being well-conceived from start to finish, and that holds true whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.

Think of what all of this does to a writer’s mind.

It’s not exactly going to hurt my brain, is it, ladies and gentlemen?

Hell, it might even help.

END

Author's Note: Writing a hyper-text requires hyper-thinking, hyper-editing, and a kind of hyper-conception of the whole project from top to bottom. It is layered thinking rather than strictly linear.

The Lifetime Under-Achievement Awards.

A proud moment.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you…thank you.

Revelation and enlightenment doesn’t come easily, and to some, it never comes at all.

And yet in a few short years of tenure on this rinky-dink little planet, it has been my good fortune to receive at least a modicum of both.

In a brief Shakespearean aside, I would especially like to thank those who were dragged here by their spouses, quite against their will, and I appreciate that, I really do. I will keep my remarks as brief as possible for your sakes as well as my own.

Okay, here we go then.

I am among the most fortunate of men. But a person, one such as I, doesn’t get where they are today without a lot of help from a lot of good, bad, and indifferent people over the years.

This is my opportunity to thank all of them, and I intend to make the most of it. Such opportunities are rare, unless one is even more truly blessed than one such as I.

I would like to thank my mother and father. I would like to thank my grandparents, and my ancestors, who go all the way back to Pliny, (the Even Younger, not the famous historian or his dad) if you believe the geneologists, many of whom are dead now. (My ancestors, I mean, and of course all the Plinys. Not the geneologists. Some of them are still with us.)

Honestly, I almost said gynecologists, but that is clearly not right, is it, ladies and gentlemen?

I know better than that.

I would like to thank the Ministry of Community and Social Services, the Ontario Disability Support Program, and the Government of the Province of Ontario Task Force on Life-Long Poverty.

What? What’s this?

They don’t have one?

Silly me. I thought they did, or at least, that they must have one by now. But let’s move on.

I would like to thank the Department of Labour Standards, and Ben Dover Construction of Hamilton Ontario, as well as their subdidiary, Scheibe’s Bricklaying Services.

I would like to thank the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, the Sarnia-Lambton Housing Authority, (what a lousy bunch of fucks) and the Bluewater Mental Health Association. I would like to thank the Ontario Hospital Insurance Program and Dr. Pierre d’Elegance, of Main Street in Burlington, Ontario.

Whoever would have guessed that a back injury required treatment, or, at a minimun, X-rays and some documentation.

Ah, well, you live and you learn. Live and learn, ladies and gentlemen.

I must especially take the time to thank the good folks, my former neighbours down on Sigourney St. You taught me what it means not to be quite, er, quite.

I would like to thank the Provincial Court of Ontario, as well as Sarnia Police Services and their Crime Stoppers Rat-Off-A-Buddy Program. I would like to thank the good people down at the Inn of the Good Shepherd and the Salvation Army, and of course the people at the St. Vincent De Paul.

You picked me up when I was down, and then fed me, and then let me drop when the next guy came in the door.

An important lesson in life there, ladies and gentlemen.

I would like to thank Shank, and Squiggly, the Wiggler, and Bumstead, Little Baby Jesus, and all the ships at sea.

More than anything, I would like to thank Miss Hellmore, my Grade Seven teacher at St. Bent-dict’s elementary school on Joak Street, which as you may know, is right across the street from where Commander Chris Hadfield (Yay!) went to school, that is to say Queen Elizabeth II elementary school.

I would like to thank my mentor, Monsignor Notte-Trudeau, for helping me with the anger management, and I would also like to thank all the kids I grew up with; for to grow up without kids to grow up with would be a fine kettle of fish indeed.

(Are we okay for time? How are we on time?)

The producer says we’re good.

Hmn.

That’s about all I had to say.

OH!

I would like to thank every cat I ever had, for you brought some love and joy and if you will forgive me, something soft, warm and cuddly into my life.

I would also like to thank the half-dozen or so foster kids who passed through our household in fairly regular succession.

You helped make a home, until you went and did something stupid and wandered off and got hit by a car, providentially bleeding to death in my arms. (I am referring to the cat, ladies and gentlemen.) As to where all those other brothers and sisters may be today, that is a very good question. And I sure am glad you asked it.

I would like to thank the good old boys at the Paranoid Club, and of course I would like to thank my first girlfriend—such compassion. Such compassion, ladies and gentlemen.

I think she really did love me, otherwise why stick around so long?

I ask you that.

I’m sure I have a Kleenex or a hanky or something in my pocket. Ah, yes, here we are. It’s just that the lights are so bright.

(Sniffle, sniffle.)

Oh, boy, here we go again.

(Drinks water.)

That always helps, eh, ladies and gentlemen?

So. Anyhew.

So where do we go from here? Well, there is a wet bar, and I know we’re all thinking about that, but more than that, ladies and gentlemen, we will stride boldly (or baldly if you prefer) into the future, where the poor will have more microwaves and the rich will finally corner the market on sanctimony.

(Am I done yet?)

The producer is shaking his head.

Well, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, so am I.

No, literally, quite frankly, and I know how you hate it when I say that, but I really am shaking my head.

Normally, I wouldn’t join any club that would have someone like me as a member, which places this evening among the great mysteries of life—that’s right, ladies and gentlemen—I’m not even a member! A bit of an oversight on the part of the selection committee, but there you go—no one is perfect, eh, ladies and gentlemen?

(Except maybe the bourgeoisie.)

Yes, it makes a fine testament to your generousity and thoughtfulness, and ah, puts everything in a whole new light, doesn’t it.

Did I just say tit?

Not like me, I have to admit, but it has happened before.

I shall try to do better in the future.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, the producer is making throat-cutting motions so I guess that’s it for me.

Thank you for being here to share my moment of triumph, for these moments come all too seldom in life and it is always good to have someone there for you. It’s nice when someone actually sees it happen.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t matter nearly so much, would it?

And now we’ll turn the microphone back to our genial host—almost said ‘genital’ there, but I caught it in time.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Butch Padorcik, your master of ceremonies and a well-known local raconteur, drunkard, and a bit of a bully in his off hours.

And last but not least, I must thank you, Butch. Thank you. I have learned much from you, sir.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Bye, everybody—and with luck we’ll see you again next year, unless I can come up with a valid-sounding excuse.

(Dutiful applause.)

Here’s a song for you lovely ladies and gentlemen. Yes, the gentlemen are lovely too! (You know who you are.)

It’s called Howl, performed by Beware of Darkness. Either that, or it’s called Beware of Darkness…by Howl. I didn’t write it, but it’s still pretty good.

Still struggling.

Months later, I’m still struggling with depression. In this post, I talked about how depression is like night and day.

What happened? Winter is very hard for me. It’s dark, it’s cold, the days are short and the nights are long. There’s not much to do. I don’t go cycling, swimming, or walking in the woods.

All I do is to work, and at one time that work gave me hope for the future.

Then after seven months of crap, where I struggled with depression every stinking day, spring was dark, wet, cold, miserable, and it went on forever.

This has been the crappiest summer on record in recent years in terms of cold, wet, dark, windy and cloudy conditions…

Some little thing triggers depression, it doesn’t even have to be much. I think I was at a low ebb anyway, since my dad and my grandmother died last fall. Grief has its own logic.

Thinking about my father always brings sadness. My grandmother was over a hundred years old, perhaps that is the difference. She wanted to die—ever since my grandfather died, she prayed for God to take her. For her, death came as blessed relief.

Depression is a physical illness, with physical symptoms.

In spite of that depression, I wrote another novel, my eleventh. That novel has been submitted to a major publisher. The work is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes. Yet there are times when I don’t want to come home.

I have to go home, otherwise I don’t eat and have nowhere to sleep. The thought of going home, working on a book or story, one that is not going to change or even improve my life, is tough sometimes. And yet it’s all I have. It’s all I fucking have.

I have some thoughts on the subject of book submissions. The odds of that novel being accepted are very slim—about one chance in ten or twenty thousand. It will take eight or nine months to get a rejection slip, and the number of major publishers who do not require an agent is small. It’s a short list. It could take years at that rate to go through all of them, and the odds don’t improve in any way.

Smaller publishers have fewer production slots to begin with. They tend to be more conservative, they tend to take fewer chances with the corporate wallet on new, unknown and untested authors.

My books are always just a little bit different. They’re looking for the next Harry Potter, and I don’t write that sort of thing.

And when all else fails, the specter of do-it-yourself vanity self-publishing looms before me.

You know what I’m talking about: Amazon, Smashwords, Nook’s Pub-It, Createspace, etc.

It is clearly vanity publishing—for to publish in vain is what it is for most of us. Some of us don’t have much ego left. It’s all been smashed out of us.

I get to stand on a big cliff and pitch my book into the black hole that is the fate of most self-published authors. I get to read enthusiastic blog posts by newbie authors, who are brimming with confidence and have no idea of what they are talking about, and then there are the blog posts by successful authors, brimming with confidence and who have no idea of what they are talking about.

I’m sick of it all. Unfortunately, I’ve spent thirty years leading up to this writing, this ability to write well.

It seems like a terrible waste of time.

I have never considered what else I might do.

That was clearly an oversight, but nothing else really interests me. I’m fifty-four years old, after all.

See, here’s one of my problems: book cover images. It might cost as little as $35.00 for a pro marketing image, an image that will be virtually indistinguishable from ten thousand other marketing images in a given genre. Good covers help to sell bad books. We all know that.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on a provincial disability pension—one that is thirty-five percent below the poverty line, for the last sixteen years. I’ve lived in pain, poverty and deprivation for over twenty years. I can’t afford twenty or thirty marketing images, all of which would have to be paid for by subsequent books sales. I would still have to go without food, or make some sacrifice to come up with the money in the first place. I’m already lining up at food banks three or four times a month. I would like to know where is the slack in my budget, where I could cut something out and get that money in a reasonable time-frame.

A better solution would have been to use my Smashwords royalties, along with a GST cheque and a Trillium Benefit cheque, and buy a $500.00 computer, one that has a minimum of Pentium IV, so that it is capable of running Adobe CS-6. I would have to go through the learning curve, and then I could create my own covers.

Kick-Starter and other crowd-funding sources would be deeply misunderstood by the Ontario Disability Support Program, and so it’s unsuited to my needs. They would consider it ‘income,’ even though I might not have access to the funds and the funds would of course be dedicated to those marketing images, (a legitimate business expense if almost any other person in the whole wide world were to do it.) I can’t do it on the sly, as the world is full of rats, and I have been subjected to trolling in some small degree in the past. It’s not worth losing my pension over it, and then having to fight the ODSP for the next two or three years while they wriggle, squirm, and force me to prove my innocence—a perversion of justice in anyone’s book.

Unfortunately, Smashwords decided to withhold 30 % of my earnings in taxes. This is a bit odd as they cheerfully admit to having my ITIN, (U.S. tax number) on file. So no new computer for me.

It took me four fucking years to earn that computer. Unfortunately, Smashwords knew better.

The neat thing about depression is when it flips over into anger mode. When I think of all the crap people keep bottled up inside, out of politeness, or not wanting to draw negative attention to themselves, for surely few people will understand, (or admit to understanding,) it’s no wonder people go postal sometimes.

They can’t deal with it.

They keep it inside just a little too long, maybe.

When that happens, all bets are off.

Here I am looking at another long winter without much to do except…fucking write, in the rather forlorn and unrealistic hope that it will, eventually, help to change my life. And with every year that goes by, my time on this Earth gets shorter, and shorter, and more precious and valuable with every passing day. I despise wasting my precious time. I fucking loathe wasting my time, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m also a bit tired of being alone all the time.

Surely I deserve so much better than this.

***

All my books and stories are currently free from iTunes and other fine online bookstores.

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/artist/louis-bertrand-shalako/id412091968?mt=11

Snakes and ladders, bad bosses.

The world of work has an armload of promises for you.

When I got hired in the industrial door business, they made me a helper. I had never done any carpentry or welding, although I worked on my own car and had a few simple tools. They put me with Pete, a guy with exactly one year’s experience and sent us off with a handful of orders, a pickup truck, a torch and a welder. I had used a torch in high school shop—about four times as I recall.

We had a few tool bins and a few ladders. We tried not to forget anything, materials, tools, fasteners, you name it, and we made sure it was aboard the truck.

You learn a lot by doing, and a few things by watching. One time we were putting a heavy-duty wood sectional door into a pole barn outside the city. I was only a small ways up off the ground, with my feet maybe seven or eight feet above the floor. I was on an aluminum ladder with the swiveling sure-grip feet on it. With the siding on, and in a new building, there was nowhere to tie the top off. Theoretically we could have screwed something into a beam and used a bit of wire.

There must have been some grain dust on that highly-polished concrete floor. I can’t quite recall what I was doing, but whatever torque or force I applied—perhaps I might have been trying to screw something to the ceiling, to hang the back of the track on that side, but the feet slipped out and the ladder went.

Nowhere to tie off, and where's your nine-buck an hour helper?

Now a pole barn is constructed of vertical beams with narrow horizontal laths, which is what the metal siding is screwed onto. They’re one above another, set about a foot apart. The top of the ladder hit every one of them. I ratcheted down the wall, one lath at a time. I had time to think, and to enjoy the scenery. The frickin’ irony of it all. I was younger and fitter then. Like a cat, in some ways, after clambering up and down ladders and scaffolds all the time. Some big doors had catwalks above them…on a really big door, you can go across from side to side on the tops of the sections. But this was a small door. I danced on the ladder all the way to the ground, where I ended up with one leg sticking through and under it and me, and the other leg all ‘akimbo’ as they say. I had bruises all up and down both legs, and it wasn’t too good. I said a few things.

Another time we were in a brand-new, municipal trucking garage. They were going to bring the dump trucks and salt trucks indoors. It was easier to maintain them, they were less prone to theft or vandalism. Nuff said. Due to the big trucks, we were installing a high-lift door, which basically goes up a couple of feet and then the tracks lay back just like the normal type. They were such nice guys. They let us use their scaffolding and everything as the guys putting in the sprinklers weren’t there that day. It was their idea and everything. I’m not sure if Pete and I had used them much before that.

So my buddy welded some angle iron across between two trusses, and hung another bar on there. When I told him it was straight, he tacked her on. One side of the tracks were hung temporarily. I unlocked the six-inch wheels, all four corners, as he was telling me to push him across to the other side.

Running down the middle of that truck garage, as yet still under construction—hence the new door and stuff, was a twelve by eighteen-inch concrete trench, covered for its full length by twelve-inch spruce planks laid in there just so, on the little rabbit they had for the purpose. All that melting snow, and they were going to wash trucks in one end of the building. The metal gratings hadn’t arrived on the site yet, probably still being fabbed up in town or just down the road in some welding shop. And when the two far wheels hit the plank the thing split right down the middle. The feet dropped into the trench, and including my buddy, it was a half of ton of dead weight. My end tipped up. The force and the leverage might have been enough to catapult me up into the rafters, but the scaffold had stringers across the bottom and they hit the edge. The far vertical risers hit the far side of the trench. My stomach was on the bottom cross-stringer, and at that time I weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds. There was a long moment when I knew there was nothing more I could do. But she didn’t go over. My buddy was saying a few things, and his body didn’t go plummeting past me…

“Hey, Pete! Are you okay?” Finally four fingers clapped over the end of the planks he was on.

The other hand came up and over and clamped on. The top of his head appeared and then his eyes. He said a few things, I said a few things.

Theoretically, we had been in and out of industrial plants many times, and we had sat through any number of safety meetings, and safety ratings, and I guess you could say we had seen all the film strips in the industry.

We still did dumb things. Even when we thought we knew something, but no one saw fit to mention the drainage trench. It was safe for their purposes. There’s no telling why we sort of missed seeing it, never even comprehending it as a possible threat.

No matter if you’ve got thirty years in the industry, just because you have experience, doesn’t mean the last guy did or the next guy will.

I don't care how much you make. It's not worth getting killed over.

You see, one time I was working for these bricklayers. We were on a building, six stories, in Hamilton. We were using two sections of scaffolding, with planks across the centre gap to bridge and make it three sections long. I built the thing myself, all those years of experience you know, and it was okay. I was slugging mortar, and carrying twelve-inch heavy blocks, with another guy, and we were keeping three bricklayers going. We were doing okay and would make it through another fine summer’s day—at nine bucks an hour.

I went across to bring a guy something and one of the planks just let go. It cracked right in the middle. What you don’t know can kill you, because apparently some guys, who were in fact laid off for stupidity, had been asked to clean off the roof one day, a few weeks beforehand.

The silly buggers decided the quickest way to do that was to yell down and clear the area, then chuck it all off the roof. I’m thinking the plank that had my name on it was probably one of them planks they threw off there.

What the hell are you going to do? By the time the boss, the foreman and a lawyer had a go at me, I was ready to sign anything, even a false incident report.

They said I hurt my back ‘lifting blocks.’ The boss’s kid was a lawyer (Snakes and Ladders—get it?) and I was in a lot of pain. It never occurred to me to get a lawyer of my own.

They promised to help me with the Worker’s Compensation forms. They promised to take me back when I felt better. Of course the first thing Worker’s Comp wanted to see was the incident report—and it didn’t make a lot of sense considering what I put on my application form. But it was too late.

Why did I sign it? Otherwise the place would have been knee-deep in inspectors and they would probably have shut the job down, and then everyone would be out of a job. That’s what they said. And my brother worked there too. See, we never get any training in how to handle situations like that. But my employer clearly did have some previous experience, didn’t he?

Yeah.

Like a fool, I signed the damned thing.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

END