Many of you may have seen the show “Dirty Jobs” on the
Discovery Channel (from 2005-2012) where the host, Mike Rowe, spends a day
accompanying people doing manual labor jobs that are classified as “dirty”
jobs. He did everything from sewer cleaner to pig farmer to taxidermist. These
types of jobs are ones that are necessary to keep our economy going and not the
ones that people get college educations for. I respect the people who perform
this kind of work. Part of the reason is that I’ve had a few of these types of
jobs in my life and I believe that others would benefit from it as well. Here
are some of the details.
Charcoal bagger
This is one of the jobs that Mike actually put in his list
of the seven dirtiest jobs that he had. Here is what he had to say about it:
"Labor
Day cookouts don't happen without a relatively small number of people walking
into what amounts to a giant bunker where scrap wood is slowly charred for 72
hours," said Rowe. It's not burned, but rather charred, like a S'more,
"just to the point where it becomes internally toasted. Then you hammer
the wood, beat it to pieces, and there's smoke everywhere, and you look like Al
Jolson."
My first paying job (at about
age 10 or 12) was bagging charcoal at the “charcoal pit” at the end of the road. A local neighbor, Mr.
Seery, who owned the land, would cut down some trees, put the logs in an
enclosure, light it, then seal the entrance so as it burned it would turn to
charcoal. It took several days for Mr. Seery and his sons to cut enough trees
to fill the enclosure and, as noted above, about 3 days of charring to turn the
trees into charcoal. After opening the enclosure, it took another day or so for
the charcoal to cool down enough that we could begin breaking apart the big
pieces and start the bagging process.
My cousin Dave and I would
use a shovel, minus handle, to scoop up the charcoal, fill sturdy paper bags
and wrap a wire twist tie around the neck. We got paid so much a bag. It was dirty work, but both Dave and I were hard workers and it was
good pocket money. That meant that every few weeks during the summer Dave and I would
get to work for several days to bag everything. We’d come home just coated with
the charcoal dust. Not sure how my mother felt about how black I got doing
this, but it kept us out of trouble and taught us good work ethics.
Truck Tire Recapping
This is another job that Mike Rowe featured in one of his shows.
The below video gives some idea of what was involved, but this video shows some
of the more advanced technology that is now being used. I’ll note below what
was different when I had this job.
In 1966, I graduated from high school and needed to have a
summer job to earn money to pay for college. My father had seen a job posted at
a small business that he went by on the way to his work. The name of the
business was “Service Tire.” While they had a showroom where they sold car
tires, the primary focus of the business was repairing and recapping truck
tires. The owner, Andy, worked on the car tire sales part of the business, together
with one lady in the business office. My only exposure to that side of the
business was when they needed the sales floor restocked with tires. They were
stored in the basement and I’d go down the stairs, load up four tires on each
arm and bring them up to be stacked in the showroom.
Everyone else there worked in the tire repair/recapping side
of the business (and mostly recapping with only a few repairs from time to time).
There were 3 full-time employees, John (the supervisor), Fred (a black fellow),
and Frenchie (so called because he was French-Canadian). There were two of us
who applied for a job there. I was a skinny 17-year old who weighed
perhaps 155 pounds. The guys who worked in the shop didn’t think that I’d last
two weeks and they were betting on the other teen. But whereas he quit after
less than two weeks, I continued not only the entire summer, but came back the
next summer as well. It was 55 hours a
week, nine hours a day and ten on Saturday – with overtime that was 62.5 hours
pay at $1.60/hour or a gross of $100/week.
Recapping truck tires is a tiring, tedious job:
·
Step 1 – mount the tire on a buffer that slowly
turns the tire past a set of spinning blades that chew off all the outer
surface of the tire, even out any flat spots, etc. While the tire is still mounted on the
buffer, you also had to check for any tire imperfections, noting any holes that
need patching, grinding out any spots that need it, etc. [Unlike the video
above, we had no automated equipment to scan for imperfections, it was a totally
manual inspection.]
·
Step 2 – spray a temporary adhesive on the buffed-up
surface, put the new raw rubber around the outside and stitch it down (stitcher
is like a thick pizza cutter but with a ribbed edge). [We had no overhead carrying system, so we
then had to just carry the tire with brute force from the buffer to the
spreader. I could carry nearly all tires by myself, only needed help once when
we had a 12x24 tire with 10 layers of steel that took two of us to carry.]
·
Step 3 – put the tire on a spreader which has
one set of paddles holding each of the two tire beads, then use air pressure to
spread the beads apart which shrinks the overall diameter of the tire (don’t
stand in front of the tire as if the paddles slip they will kill you – there
was a hole in the cinder block wall at the opposite side of the building from
one such slippage!); put an aluminum band on the tire that has the new tread on
the inside. [Unlike the video, we did not use cured rubber tread, but used raw uncured
rubber and the tread design was in the aluminum band.]
·
Step 4 – put on a heavy metal rim, put the whole
thing on a round table with another round table over it, clamp it all together,
inflate the inner tube, then run high-temperature steam through the tubes
around the outside of the band.
·
Step 5 – “cook” for several hours. The rubber
gets melted into the design on the inside of the aluminum band then cures.
·
Step 6 – remove everything and you have a newly
retreaded tire.
It was generally 90% humidity and over 90 degrees, so with
the black rubber dust that you quickly get coated with, you sweat a lot –
making the black dust stick even more.
It was hot, hard work, but I came to appreciate this experience over the
coming years.
I did the above nine hours a day from M-F. On Saturday we
didn’t recap, but there were other duties. The first thing in the morning I had
to take a junk truck that we had out back and drive it to the city dump and
empty it there. The truck sat there all week and we loaded it up with empty
boxes that the rubber had come in, the rubber dust from the buffing operation,
and any other trash from the store. I’d borrow one of our dealer plates from one
of the other shop trucks, and use jumper cable to start the engine.
The “junk truck” was a real piece of trash. Besides having a
dead battery (which is why I had to jump it to get started), the turn signals
didn’t work, the clutch was shot so you had to “double clutch” it to shift, and
the brakes were shot so you had to pump the brakes while pulling on the
emergency brake to stop it. So, part of the job requirement was you had to know
how to use a stick shift, know how to give hand signals out the window to
indicate turns, etc. Since the dump was only a few miles away it wasn’t too
bad, except for the one time that the truck stalled while I was unloading it
and it took me close to an hour of giving the battery a rest before trying to
start it again.
Once I got back to the shop it was time to make a delivery
run. We had a large contract with a trucking company about 25 miles away. We’d
recap their tires during the week, then deliver them every Saturday and pick up
any that they had noted needed to be recapped to bring back. My job while I was
there was to ensure that every single tire in the facility was brought up to
proper pressure (low air pressure is one of the leading causes of tire
separation due to excessive heat in the flexing). We had a small truck with a
compressor and a 200’ air hose which we stored there. I’d drive to one section
of the large facility, check every tire (trucks, trailers, and buses) in that
section, noting mentally any needing inflation, then start the compressor and
use my long hose to bring everything up to spec.
Despite it being really hard work, I enjoyed it and got
along well with my fellow workers. The only person who did not appreciate it
was my mother. When I got home each day my instructions were “don’t touch
anything, just walk straight to the downstairs bathroom, strip down and shower.”
Dirty jobs are everywhere. And the people that are in them
are some of the nicest folks I’ve ever had to work with.
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