Proletariat Plodding, Part 4

The fourth (and final) in a brief series of posts detailing the vagaries and inanities of my meteoric rise from fast food fry guy to construction middle management.

Wherein is revealed that most engineers are assholes; garbage has redeeming qualities; it's hard to make grocery shopping fun; and I'm currently approaching limbo.  And not the kind where you're drunk and try to walk under a stick, although that would be more fun.

Today's Final Four:

What are you here for... drugs?

Rubbish

Graveyard shift

Constructicon (more than meets the eye)

What are you here for... drugs?

My first real-ish engineering job was one summer at a local pharmaceutical plant.  Most people think 'chemical plant' and it's this monstrosity that usurped the land previously occupied by 17 farming families who are now hitching a ride to Saskatchewan on the pittance they got for the land, and will end up wasting the money in the first reservation casino they stumble upon, subsequently drinking themselves to death due to the depression of having lost their land and their money.

Not so with pharmaceuticals.  A 12-gallon tub of white powder is worth a LOT of money.  Even if it's the type you don't inhale.  What they lack in quantity they make up for in quality.  The entire plant would be dwarfed in a typical Wal-Mart.

I was a little alarmed during my indoctrination tour when I had certain barrels of chemicals pointed out to me.  Especially the hydrofluoric acid.  That's some nasty shit.  A guy once spilled some on his bare hand and, so the story went, after his hand got all red and inflamed, he got real sick and DIED.  See, the acid got into his skin and fucked around with his blood, which has this nasty habit of circulating to every other part of your body.  Bad times, that.

So anyway, I was working directly for this engineering technician and my first job was to design a trolley.  There was this table-top oven used to dry samples of drugs and they regularly swapped it between rooms.  But it was real frikkin' heavy, see.  So the trolley had to be designed to support the weight of the oven AND be the exact height of the table upon which the oven rested in order to facilitate transportation.

Great fun.

The engineering tech and I both reported to the Engineering Manager.  Atan was my first Pointy Haired Boss.  He carried a magically refilling coffee cup with him wherever he went and spoke in nothing but condescending tones.  I never actually saw him do anything but conduct meetings and spew advice.

It is men like this that give many other engineers a bad reputation.  Never mind the fact that 'men like this' seem to comprise well over half the engineering populace.

I worked there for only four months between school years, and the trolley I designed in my first two weeks was finally produced in my last two weeks there.  Another lesson I've taken with me.

Rubbish

Easily my favourite pre-career job was the summer I spent working for the student rubbish hauling company.

An entrepreneurial business student at the university started up a junk hauling side business to put himself through school.  Now, 10 years later, his ubiquitous yellow bins are a sure sign of the fact that it's turned into something a little bit more.

Over the summer we worked six days a week and I got to drive a one-ton truck around the city, picking up people's expired appliances, tree trimmings, renovation detritus, roof shingles, and whatever else that could conceivably be bound for the dump.  I got to work mostly outside, get some exercise and not blow black snot out my nose every night.  It was great.  Except for construction clean-up.  You have no idea how much it sucks to clean up a mound of busted drywall until you have to do it all day.

The absolute BEST part was deck demolition.  We'd occasionally get a request to estimate the demo and haul of a crappy backyard wooden deck.  When approved, we'd have at 'er with sledgehammers and crow bars and a great deal of gusto.  If one of the other trucks caught wind of the action, they'd come over to help and join in the fun.

I also had two vehicle accidents that summer.  My truck got rear-ended by a careless driver in the first one, but I was the careless one in the second.  I was leaving the dump and turning onto the highway from the side road.  I had a yield sign which I had sort of gotten into the habit of ignoring, seeing as how I'd driven that stretch so often and there was NEVER anybody coming. 

Except for that semi truck.

He tried to avoid me, and thanks to the fact that his trailer was empty, managed mostly to do so.  He still swiped the back driver's side of my truck with his passenger wheel well.  When we stopped shaking and got out of the truck, there was a hole punched in the wooden box of my truck, and a 10-foot rod of jagged steel that had been sheared off his wheel well was sitting in our cargo area, a fresh dent in the cab of my truck right about where my head would have been.

Trippy.

It took six years for that "At-Fault" claim to be cleared from my driving record.  I didn't get fired, which was cool.

Graveyard shift

Though I do most of the grocery shopping here at home, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I enjoy it.  Neither is it enjoyable when you get to drive around a warehouse on a powerjack and do all the shopping for mom and pop grocery stores around the province of Alberta.

Again, I knew a guy who got me in at the warehouse, putting together grocery orders to be trucked out to various stores around the province.  We 'picked' the orders at night and they were loaded and drove out in the morning.

I was incredibly relieved when I got the chance to leave the dry good section (in the middle of the summer, it's still freakin' hot at night in a warehouse) and try my hand at picking produce.  It was much more temperate in the controlled environment of the refrigerator section.  Not to mention the fact that most folks made a habit of ensuring the strawberries were still comestible and the asparagus spears still fresh.  We were a considerate lot.  We'd even clean up busted canteloupes that accidentally fell on the floor.

What I didn't enjoy - at all - was going back to this job after I graduated from university.  It was a very hard blow to my ego (being an arrogant prick of an engineer at this point) to have graduated without a job - an engineering job - to report to.

Thankfully, I knew a guy, and I was outta there again within the month, never to go back.

Constructicon (more than meets the eye)

There's an irony here, though.

See, the guy I knew was the husband of the cousin of my then-girlfriend who was, for a time, also my fiancee.  That whole thing fell apart, but I kept the job.

Though it didn't last for long, it was sort of awkward to report to a guy whose wife's cousin had dumped me and we still had to carry on a professional business relationship.  I changed roles in the company shortly after that, and it's old news by now.

Though I do my best to eschew labels, I've been somewhat defined by the roles and associated titles in the company for the past seven years:

scheduler
field engineer
estimator/project coordinator
project manager
manager
project lead
????

Since our company is now in the midst of an efficiency re-organisation at the behest of some very expensive consultants, the position I left back in January to take on a temporary project lead role in the re-organisation process no longer exists.  This has left me in a state of limbo until I find out what new position my skills and intangible attributes make me qualified to kick ass in.  The selection process starts late this month, with the launch of the new org structure in July.

All the employees have filled out Personal Employment Profiles, highlighting existing skill sets and career aspirations. 

Sounds like a resume to me.

I wonder how my future role will be affected by the fact that I finished off the 'career aspirations' portion of the Personal Employee Profile with:

"...and eventual world domination."

Comments

[Mark S]

Simon, what about your emergency Pop Bagging sessions? How could you forget that?!?

Also, was the graveyard shift at the warehouse you worked in the one Jeff (aka Toke) had worked in?

[marian]

This is all very interesting, especially the peek into your relationship history. I haven't gone back and read your archives, so these little flashbacks are a big help. I liked hearing you articulate the whole 'inability to argue' thing, from which a certain husband of mine also suffers. We don't fight, as a rule, or often even disagree, but over the last several years he's put some energy into learning to verbalize his side of a debate, shall we say. I've enjoyed that immensely. I think he might enjoy it too, a little.

[the Mater]

"...and eventual world domination." LOL

I think you should always aim high, dear chap. Let them know you're a serious player.

Just in case they don't take you seriously, you may want to check this website out ... it's the latest rage in my department. We're all being told to sign up and play with the colored blocks :>)

https://www.navagility.com/individuals/index.cfm

[Simon]

Mark, I had, much to my chagrin, forgotten about the pop-baggin' sessions. I feel shame.

And no, the grocery warehouse was a different one than the Toke worked at.

For some reason I don't think I'll be able to reach you at the email address you left on your post. Is that @goat tethered, perhaps?!

[Linda]

I feel like I know you so much better now, almost in a bibliographical sense. No, wait, that's not really like a resume. Never mind, sounded funny when I first thought of it...

[Mark S]

Simon, I'm not a fan of giving out my e-mail address to the 'internet'. Especially on a site that gets people coming to it who search for such things as 'pics men in the bathtub' (http://simianfarmer.blogs.com/simian_farmer/2004/11/google_searches.html).

As for the goat, of course it's tethered. ALWAYS TETHER YOUR GOATS!

[Mark]

Enjoyed this series. The trolley design job sounds fascinating, to a guy who probably could not design such a thing even with plenty of sleep and the perfect brain foods. I hope everything shakes out okay at work.

[Jim (of Brazil)]

Simon,

Interesting series on your rise from blue collar working stiff to wearer of achromatic neck attire. I enjoyed the vignettes. It will be interesting to see if you are still blogging when you eventually make it to "pointy-haired world overlord".

But I feel compelled to point out one thing: you repeatedly use the phrase "meteoric rise" to describe your trajectory through life. But based on my limited knowledge of astronomy (I majored in it up to my third year of university!)...

Meteors don't rise! They fall!

Just wondering if that usage is somehow metaphorical ... ?

[Linda]

Maybe in Brazil they would consider that the Simian might overlook something such as that but we here in the North (USA and Canada), know better. Simon thinks it ALL out... and he does it 24/7 at the same time that he's doing ten things simultaneously and that was redundant and I'll stop now.