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