LOVE WORKING, AND OTHER MYTHS

Love working? Go ahead and love it up.

Explain how anyone loves working makes you sound like you’ve never had a job.

Have you? Did you love it?

Here’s a view from coast to coast:

No one loves chipping fried pitch out of sawmill furnaces used for drying plywood veneer.

Except college kids in the west willing to accept time and half over the weekend when the dryers are shut down.

They loved the boost in the tuition fund, but the work was hot, cramped, and dusty with the sort of airborne particulate that only happens in certain industrial spaces.

Sawmill Lung?

The perception of the west is still the Wild West in some eastern cities.

I’m not here to trash Easties but don’t ask them geography questions about which states border each other.

Hot tip: Wyoming doesn’t have a beach.

From the left coast we all think the east is paved over and everyone works at a desk in a sky scraper.

Clean work instead of the dirty work.

Love Hard Work? Okay Boomer

The west isn’t full of truck-driving loggers and miners and cowboys anymore than the east is full of train-commuting desk jockey sissy-boys.

But they all have more in common than differences.

Do they love working, or love having a job they don’t have to talk about, explain, or demonstrate?

Don’t get me wrong, a logger knows all about the tree, the miner the mine, the cowboys the cow.

But no one hands you a chainsaw, a pick-ax, or a lariat, and says, “Get to work.”

First you get tested.

Are you strong enough for the work? Smart enough not to hurt yourself and others? Do you whine and complain about the weather?

The Eastie needs to find their way to the train, get off at the right stop, walk in a door to a building, take an elevator, find their desk, and sit down.

Whew, I’m worn out just writing the Get-To-Work Manual for everyone living east of the Mississippi.

After a morning break, lunch break, afternoon break; after entering data, manipulating data, and sending data, they reverse tracks and go home.

Making The Connection

This blogger has chipped pitch in the West and pushed paper in the East so you can believe me when I say, “Here’s a connection you haven’t heard of.”

My east coast residency coincided with a big, huge big, project in the west I had no clue about.

But in my job as a Settlement Day Analyst, clerk, minion, before desktop computers and networks, I saw the same bond trade paper month after month.

WPPSS.

What was WPPSS?

The Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) was formed in the 1950s to make certain that the Pacific Northwest had a constant source of electrical power.

The idea to use clean, cheap nuclear power became popular in the 1960s, and WPPSS, which would come to be better known as “Whoops,” saw an opportunity to meet growing consumption demands in the Northwest. It planned a system of five nuclear power plants that would be financed by a public issue of bonds and repaid with sales from the plants.

At the beginning of the 1980s, only one of the five WPPSS plants was nearing completion.

I finished my east coast run at the beginning of the 1980s while WPPSS collapsed.

Oddly enough it was the same time the brokerage I worked for, E.F. Hutton, also ran into the ground.

My view was unclouded by accountability to big money and power.

All I did was pay attention, thinking about what could have been.

Don’t call me a jinx but two out of three Army bases I served on also closed.

Why I Love Working At BoomerPDX

This blog is powered by the will to keep people connected.

Connected to what?

Memories, families, communities.

Connected to friends, teams, songs, novels.

Connected to metal, weight, fitness.

Browse this blog and you may find yourself as excited as the spam-bots who leave wonderful comments.

According to them I’m the best writer since the alphabet was invented.

The most engaging writer this side of Homer.

I’ll lift that weight.