He was (maybe) the man for the jobe (06/18/08)

"You afraid of heights?" The crew chief asked.

It was a summer job during my college years, and the rest of the crew was older, more experienced, and tougher than I was.

In other words, I was trying to prove myself.

We were working on installing a new, electronically-controlled storage system at a baking company in Richmond. Most of my grunt-level work involved bending conduit and pulling endless miles of wire. A number of huge bins - silos, really - had been erected in an addition to the old plant on a concrete pad.

An enormous control panel, which looked sophisticated at the time but would be considered primitive today, hung on one wall. That's where all the wires I was pulling would eventually come together.

When the project was completed, an operator would be able to send flour, sugar, and other raw materials from the silos to equipment where they would be mixed to become cookies or crackers or something else.

"You afraid of heights?" The guy asked.

It was something like my first week on the job.

I did my best to frame an answer: If you tell me to climb a ladder, I'll climb a ladder. But if you tell me I'm going to have to climb a ladder two days from now, I'll probably worry about it and be apprehensive.

That's what I told him. Or something like that. I'm sure I didn't say, "apprehensive."

"That's good," he replied, as I recall. "Because nobody else on the crew likes heights."

That's how it happened that for the next several weeks I found myself about two stories up on an extension ladder leaning against the curved side of one of the silos, installing sensing devices that would monitor the volume of flour.

Not my dream job. I didn't do it well, but nobody else seemed to want to do it.

I should have learned my lesson, but only a few weeks later the crew had to make a connection to a huge electrical box in the plant.

The box was roughly the size of a small closet, and it was necessary to use a torch to cut a new hole in the top so we could connect power for all those silos.

The work was scheduled for after 5 p.m., theoretically so that power to the electrical box could be shut off.

But when the time arrived, the guy heading up the crew learned that the second shift needed the power to stay on in that part of the plant.

In other words, the torch was going to be cutting a hole into a large and live electrical box.

"I need you to do something," the crew chief said, or something similar. Probably because I'd been stupid enough to do the ladder work, I was the one he turned to.

As the torch cut through, there was a good chance that bits of metal would fly into the live electrical box. Obviously, that would be a problem. What was needed was for someone to get into the box and hold a funnel-shaped piece of aluminum to direct any bits of metal from the hole we were cutting safely out and away.

The key words of the previous sentence are "get into the box."

Maybe it was a matter of proving my manhood to the rest of the crew. Maybe I was vaguely flattered that the chief thought that I had nerve to do it.

Whatever the reason, I agreed.

It only took five or ten minutes, but it was five or ten of the longest minutes of my life.

Afterwards, heading for home and replaying the experience in my head, I asked why I was the one who got into the box.

"Simple," the crew chief said, "you're the one with no dependents."[[In-content Ad]]