I’d like to thank Pops for submitting this entry and even providing a cartoon with it! Also, I’d like to admit that I have been less than regular with updates lately. Well, I’m getting married in less than two weeks so I think you’re just going to have to deal with it for a few weeks. I’ll try to get back on a more regular schedule after that. A sneak peak at upcoming posts: Another argument between my fiance and myself, our 5th member of the CWHOF, and the dog scammers. Anyway, enough of my rambling, here is Pops’ nomination for the Co-Worker Hall of Fame!

The Toad

Your Co-Workers Hall of Fame got me reminiscing about the summers I spent working in an oil refinery to help pay for my college mis-education. The refinery was owned by Amoco, which should tell you something about how long ago this was.

For those who don’t remember, Amoco sported a red, white and blue logo and at one time was known as American Oil Company. Before that it was Standard Oil of Indiana. And before that it was the source of J. D. Rockefeller’s billions. A while back, the former American Oil Company was swallowed up by British Petroleum. If we could only harness the energy of old J. D. spinning in his grave it would put us a long way down the road to energy independence.

All of which is a round about way of making the point that this was a different era. One where companies took a paternalistic attitude towards their employees – jobs for life, health insurance, pension, that type of thing. In return, the employees kept the place running, bought the company’s products and agreed not to be too blatant when they broke the rules.

Part of the system at Amoco was summer jobs for employees’ kids. It was great for the kids who were paid two or three times what their friends made as car hops. And it was great for the company, which got a small army of college kids to take care of all the dirty jobs that had been put off since the previous summer.

Before I get to my coworkers, I should probably share a couple of my own exploits.

One summer my job description included driving the hose truck to the scene of any fire that might occur. When I mentioned that the truck was a stick and I only knew how to drive an automatic, I was told, “Don’t worry, nothing will happen and, if it does, you’ll figure it out.” It did and I didn’t. I drove to the fire in first gear being passed all along the way by people WALKING to the fire. And these folks were not in the habit of moving quickly, even to a fire.

Another summer I drove a dump truck. By this time I had learned how to drive a stick and, to ease my boredom, I transformed my route into a racecourse – upshifting, downshifting and generally avoiding the brakes. On one, record-setting lap, I learned that the center of gravity of a fully loaded dump truck is considerably higher than that of the average racecar. It is, in fact, possible to balance a dump truck on two wheels for a very short period of time. I suspect it is also possible to roll a dump truck over on its side but I decided against further testing. As far as I know my lap record still stands.

OK, so maybe I should be nominating myself for the coworker hall of fame but I was just a crazy college kid. My coworkers were professionals. And when it came to bending the rules and playing the system for all it was worth these guys had a lot to teach me.

I have especially fond memories of the time I spent working in what I’ll refer to (for reasons that will soon become clear) as the Pond. My job consisted of putting metal bases on cardboard tubes to create a carton. After I had created several of these cartons, I stacked them neatly on a palette and they were picked up by a forklift and taken away to be filled with road tar. The driver of the forklift was a large chap with an unfortunate resemblance to a toad. The forklift inevitably became known as the Lily Pad. The Toad mounted the Lily Pad at eight-thirty every morning, hopped off briefly for lunch and then reoccupied his perch until three-thirty in the afternoon.

If you’re counting hours I should probably explain our workday. Our shift was officially from eight to four-thirty with a thirty-minute break for lunch at noon. This meant you were required to be on the job by eight. By on the job, I mean physically at the location where you would perform your job if you actually were to perform your job. Once you were at the job-site it was generally understood that you had half an hour to get ready to actually do your job. Getting ready meaning performing such tasks as putting on your gloves and finishing your coffee and donuts.

This half-hour ritual was repeated at closing time with a slight twist. Company policy was that work stopped at four o’clock and that you had a half hour to put things in order. At four-thirty, you were free to head to the shower room or home depending upon your level of odiferousness. This actually translated into a workday that ended at three-thirty, a clean up that lasted until four and a short walk to the shower room where you hid behind a wall until four-thirty when you were free to actually enter the shower room.

The wall we hid behind was a sort of demilitarized zone between management and labor. An area we agreed not to penetrate between four and four-thirty each day. This allowed our side (the workers) to pretend we were getting away with something and the other side (management) to pretend we weren’t. The system worked amazingly well except in rare instances where a person’s job actually required him to cross the demilitarized zone during the forbidden half hour. At such times, it was necessary for all involved to develop psychosomatic tunnel vision. Later, the offender was severely chastised for his poor planning.

When the system truly excelled was during the incredible half-hour lunch hour. The official lunch period from noon to twelve-thirty was sacrosanct. It was the employee’s own time during which he could (within the bounds of law and reason) do anything he chose. Back at The Pond, we slept. These guys were incredible. They could be talking to you at eleven-fifty-nine and snoring at the stroke of noon. They slept on cardboard boxes, in the back of pickups, on wooden benches and sitting on a forklift. At twelve-thirty they woke up and finish the sentence they had been in the middle of at noon.

All of which was fine and within the rules but didn’t leave a lot of time for lunch. And, believe me, after a hard morning on the Lily Pad, the Toad NEEDED lunch (as did the rest of us). So we ate lunch at eleven-thirty and napped at noon.

I have to admit it was several weeks before I truly understood the beauty of this system. I thought we were merely goofing off. Actually, we were involved in a masterful game of labor-management chess. This was brought to my attention one day when, at eleven-fifty, sated on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I crawled off to my cardboard box and fell asleep. Almost immediately, I was awakened by a coworker demanding to know what the hell I thought I was doing. Did I want to get them all fired?

Now, I’m not at the top of my game when I get woken up suddenly but that wasn’t the source of my confusion. I mean we were all slacking off. They were still eating, I was sleeping what’s the big deal?

The big deal was explained to me like this:

1. Lunchtime is noon to twelve-thirty. They can’t touch you during lunch. The boss catches us sleeping, we tell him to shut up, he’s keeping us awake
2. We stop work and eat lunch at eleven-thirty. The boss catches us eating at eleven-thirty, he writes us up. It’s like getting a bad mark in conduct in grade school. It makes the boss feel like he’s doing his job but nobody pays any attention.
3. What you can’t do is sleep while you’re supposed to be working. Get caught sleeping at eleven-fifty-nine, you’re fired. Get caught sleeping at twelve-oh-one, no problem.

Summary: Eat when you’re supposed to be working, sleep when you’re supposed to be eating. That, it turns out, is why they blew the whistle at noon.

What he didn’t tell me was that you could also get in trouble for working during work. It happened like this:

I’d spent Tuesday night impairing my ability to function. Come Wednesday morning work just didn’t hold its normal charms. Eventually my addled mind came up with a solution to my boredom. I would test the limits of carton-making technology. I set out to make cartons faster than they had ever been made before. And I did. I was in a carton-making zone. Cartons flew from my workstation, piling themselves into a veritable cardboard Everest.

Eventually, the Lily Pad drifted my direction. “What the hell you think you’re doing?” (This was almost always the first sentence of any conversation I had with my co-workers.) I thought it was pretty obvious what I was doing but responded that I was making cartons. “Well stop it!” the Toad croaked. Now I was truly confused and it must have showed because the Toad took pity on me and explained.

“The world only needs so many cartons of road tar each week. We make what they need by Tuesday and they’re gonna find something else for us to do Wednesday through Friday. So we gotta pace ourselves. You come in here and start piling up cartons and somebody’s gonna wonder why they ain’t full. We fill ‘em and they start wondering why they got so many cartons of tar sitting around and they put us to work somewhere else. Or worse, they start selling more tar and then we gotta work harder from here on out!”

Case closed. I spent the rest of the day stacking cartons – very meticulously – on palettes for the Toad to haul away and hide. It was a week before I got to make another carton but at least I slept well at noon.

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