There Is No Such Thing As An Accident.

Chemical Valley, photo by P199, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

There is no such thing as an accident.

Things are caused to happen.

I did three hours of hard physical labour, out in the hot sun today. My left thumb hurts, and on the way home I was sort of wondering what I did to it. Basically, I had just managed to irritate an old injury.

Then I remembered the original injury.

A guy called Jim and I were taking down an old sliding barn door, I forget what plant we were working in. They were going to take the door down and put in a rolling steel, which is much easier to weatherproof. It was just some old warehouse in the back end of a chemical plant somewhere.

Jim, making a buck an hour more than me and with more experience with welding and cutting, had gone all along the top, cutting the welds on a Z-shaped strip of sheet metal that goes over the tracks. It keeps out ice, rain, weather, leaves, anything that could interfere with the smooth operation of the door.

And he had somehow missed one weld, right on the end. Somehow poor old Jim ended up on the left end of a forty foot strip of metal, on a ladder, and I was on the right side when we figured all this out. He’s supporting the weight because every other weld had been cut. He can only hold it up for so long before something has to go. Somehow I ended back up on the top of the ladder, with the welding goggles on, supporting the metal with my left hand, otherwise it’s just going to fall when I cut that last weld, right on the very end.

I had the goggles on, and I managed to find the right spot, and hit it with the torch.

Because I was blinded in the goggles, which have minimal peripheral vision anyways, I had no idea that poor old Jim was pulling, yanking and twisting down on the other end.

I suppose it was a hot day and he was not the brightest light in the firmament, that’s for sure.

As soon as the weld let go, the hundred-pound piece of metal rolled back over my thumb.

Yeah, I was like a monkey on the ladder back then. Young guys are as stupid as shit and you don’t always get to choose your work partner either. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t fall. I managed to get the goggles up, shut off the torch and somehow not drop the metal strip, which was supported by the inside of my elbow, leaving the four fingers on my left hand free to do all of that...at least until I got the torch shut off.

***

People are funny. They like nothing better than to walk through an opening where people are working—like the time I was trying to adjust an automatic door-closer on the Post Office door down in Corunna. There were actually four doors, but mine was partially open, I was on a small stepladder and it’s actually quite funny to watch people contort themselves like yogic-limbo specialists, rather than go to all the trouble and inconvenience of lifting a hand and opening one of them other fucking doors.

Anyhow, I didn’t drop anything on anybody’s head, in either incident, and that is a good thing.

Because it probably would have killed them.

Guys get killed on the job all the time in this town and every other town.

A lot of the time it’s because they’re in a hurry, or the guy that worked on something before them was a total fucking idiot and they just didn’t see the danger.

Be very careful who you work with and who you work for.

It's not worth getting killed for ten, fifteen or twenty bucks an hour.

It's not even worth it for forty or fifty bucks an hour. It ain't worth it at any price and you need to remember that.

You need to live long enough to cash your paycheque. Trust me on that one. Dead guys can't get served at the typical bank.

If you’re in the passenger side, and your work partner is driving a hundred and forty kilometres an hour in an eighty zone, the truck overloaded with tools, materials and hardware, he’s an idiot. I don’t care if you’ve only got two days experience and he’s been there ten years. He’s still an idiot and at least now you know.

I worked for at least five different industrial door companies when I was younger, and quite frankly some of them were okay and some of them were run by manipulative jerks.

I saw a few things.

Twenty year-old guys aren’t that smart. They don’t know the boss is a shyster or a jerk or just a cheapskate, too dumb to rent a forklift for half a day to complete a $100,000 job.

Know when to walk away from the assholes.

End