Over at Left & Right, there’s this article. It’s a corker!
I am not without a few “bad job” stories myself. I used to work with a guy who got out of high school and worked as a day laborer for a temp agency. He went on a job to clean up the aftermath of a bad thunderstorm at a warehouse. The warehouse was owned by a company which sold farm supplies. This particular warehouse held TONS of bagged fish meal, a fertilizer. The winds of the thunderstorm had torn the roof off the warehouse and allowed prodigious amounts of water in, soaking the bags.
Well, DRY fish meal is a great fertilizer. Get it wet, and it changes into Purina Maggot Chow. My friend says when they opened the door, a writhing mass of happy maggots flowed like syrup out the door accompanied by the undescribable aroma of rancid, festering, rotting fish slurry. The maggots were several inches deep in the soaked fish meal and extended from wall to wall. He says that he and his co-workers redefined “projectile vomiting”. They also redefined “dropping your shovel and telling the foreman that there are some things that money won’t pay for.”
The fact that this friend and I were working in a carbon black plant, and he didn’t think THAT was the worst thing in the world says a lot.
You see, I worked for three years at a carbon black plant. My worst job? Maybe not, but one of the strangest…
Carbon black is a trade term which describes amorphous elemental carbon. Think talcum powder. How white it is,and how fine, and how a little rubbed on your skin makes it feel dry and slick. Now, think if it was a little more fine. Okay? Now turn it BLACK. Real black. So black that it has SHADES (really) of BLACK. That’s what this plant made. TONS of it every day. Most of it went to the rubber industry (for tires) and the plastics industry (for making black plastic films).
Reactors fired by natural gas and fed with heavy oil under controlled conditions produced what we called “loose blacks”. This stuff made talcum powder look like a shovel full of gravel. It would entrap air and the resulting concoction would flow like water. It was fine past the point of powder. The tiniest hole in process equipment would let it escape in tiny but very visible flakes like some sort of evil parody of snow.
One of the selling points of carbon black was that a little bit would produce a huge amount of color. This is fine if you’re trying to color the stuff to make plastic bags. But when you were walking through the plant, and you looked down and saw what looked like a little black snowflake on your arm and tried to wipe it off, this characteristic resulted in a black smear of several square inches.
So we were all colored black during our workdays. Clothing worn inthe plant once was never again suitable for use outside a carbon black plant. No amount of washing and bleaching would get the carbon black out of white T-shirts and underwear. The best we could do was a nice, even grey.
The company provided laundry facilities onsite for our workclothes. We had a bathhouse where EVERYBODY showered out before going home at the end of the day. The bathhouse had a clean side and a dirty side. You came in off the street on the clean side, stripped, and put your street clothes in the clean side locker and put on a “clean” set of plant clothes. Then you walked through a door to the dirty side and went to your job. At the end of the day, you came in from the plant into the dirty side, stripped, put your dirty set of plant clothes in your dirty side locker, showered, walked out of the shower to the clean side, dressed in your street clothes and went home.
Sometime during the day, you’d put your tools down and go do your laundry, washing your carbon black clothes and putting them in your clean locker.
At the end of the work day, every workday, there was a half-hour of paid overtime. This was “bathe-out”. The company supplied each of us with four bars of soap a week. Everybody had a five-gallon plastic bucket with several bars of soap soaking in a little water in the bottom along with a bathtowel. When you hit the shower, the first thing to hit the carbon blacked parts of your body was this towel soaked with soap slurry. It’d take the carbon black right off. We used baby oil or mineral oil to get the black out of our eyes. Failure to clean your eyes left you looking like you had a bad mascara application.
The work was good. The management treated us well, mainly because a huge percentage of new hires never made it past the orientation tour without walking off the new job. But it was a strange place to work. And it took a week of vacation away from the place before you could blow your nose and not find black residue on the tissue.