Way Down, Low Down

Holy Cow, take a good look at the conditions for that guy watching the clay as the wheel spins around.  He's wearing sandals, not work boots.  Around machinery.  The dust; fine, clay, lung clogging dust, is all around him in this facility, and he doesn't even have a simple mask on his face to protect his airways.  He will not live to be an old man working in these conditions.


Be Glad, that you are not going Back to His Old Grind!

I have been lucky. Fifty two years of work and only two weeks unemployed. I worked six years in Forestry in Kentucky and was outdoors much of the time. Indoor work was office time, and I had lots of fire fighting to make life exciting. I worked in the Southern Illinois oilfields for six years, and that was mostly outdoors too. Indoor work was mostly under trucks. The oilfield crashed in '86 and I got a job with Joy Manufacturing at their rebuild facility in Mt. Vernon. The first month (July), I spent in a rubber suit steam cleaning parts of torn down coal mining machinery, then I worked my way up to a mechanic/welder job. There was always welding smoke in the air, blue light from arc welders, lots of steel on steel noise, and the constant talk of big milling machines machining gear cases and other miner parts. It was all very depressing after working outdoors for the previous twelve years. This song by Johny Cash played in my head back then. I was glad to get back into forestry, where I spent much of the next twenty-nine years outdoors again.