Never the Same #51 Per Aspera Ad Astra

Heat! Dust! Humidity! Stink! Pain! All in a week’s hard work.

            Kirk borne a sour stomach. His heart throbbed hard in his chest. His mind whirled as he wondered if he had done the right thing committing to that kind of expense.

            Despite feeling sick about it, on the other hand, Kirk felt like making a leap, even though the financial burden undoubtedly stood great and his future wholly unsure, he had to get something going if he were going to compete in another racing season and compete capably. Right now in the winter, he couldn’t convince himself if he truly wanted to race another season, but what would he do with his life if he didn’t race next season.

            This internal conflicted dialogue exemplified how Kirk worked through decisions by not addressing them head on. He could never instantaneously fully commit on most things debating with himself to make the right decision. As he drove home, he tried to calculate if he could conceivably save enough money to pay for all that machine work if the shop got the work done in two months. He came to the inevitable conclusion: It would be impossible.

            A week went by with Kirk doing his usual 40-hour weeks at the drywall plant. His supervisor, Matt, checked in on him while on the job occasionally spelling Kirk for his breaks seeing he was on the solo position. One day, Matt, in the common practice of shooting the breeze with Kirk on any number of topics brought up that the plant was short in positions when workers wanted to take breaks. Kirk’s ears perked up with a thought. He had never put in over time hours at the plant because he had no need to do so. To Kirk, this provided an open opportunity n invitation to make more money. Perchance providence suddenly presented itself to downtrodden unsure of himself Kirk.

            Apparently, Matt caught Kirk’s interest in overtime. The next day, Matt approached Kirk and told Kirk that John needed to take the next five days off because his wife just had a premature baby. The caveat of this reveled it meant Kirk would have to take on double shifts. He explained that John held a key position on the 24-hour production line. By shuffling workers around, Matt could fill John’s spot but then he’d have to fill in his own spot. Kirk mind spun with the implications without really knowing what Matt indicated for him. Kirk asked him as such. So. Matt told him that he’s have to do his usual eight hours then fill in down below on the production line. Matt told him this would have to take this place right away seeing that John needed off�"tonight!  Uncharacteristically, Kirk girded his loins and told him yes, yes he’d do it!

            Matt told Kirk that he would be on the production line being the “edge man” where Matt reassured him wasn’t too hard a job to pick up. Matt said with the reshuffling of workers around, he put Kirk in the position that would be easiest to jump into. With a bit of increased apprehension Kirk reaffirmed that he would do it. Kirk’s first concern wasn’t whether he could do the job or how difficult the job might really be, but instead he ruminated over the possibility of working with his father. He wondered if his father would be breathing down his neck to do a good job because if Kirk didn’t do a good job, it would reflect and make the father look bad. His father probably still referred to Kirk as “his boy” to everyone he worked with. Not that Kirk had a sticking point with that reference, huh?

            Anyway, Matt told him that they would give him an hour break between shifts. Kirk took a deep breath, with his mental anguish suddenly taking the new deep twist. So he worried through his first shift wondering if he’d endure another eight hour shift. We know Kirk, and if he was responsible for something specific, he’s sure to follow through and persevere. With his usual job he never left the trapdoors open after his near-fatal incident though his self-imposed safety practice made his job just that much harder. Monitoring the flow of gypsum into the kilns, he now had to open the doors quite often to continually check the gypsum levels instead of peeking into the holes. The practice added mental and physical stress. When his relief came in with Matt in tow who told Kirk that he could have the hour before taking the production line position. Kirk’s stomach wasn’t up to eating much so he just went to the break room for a Coke and some junk food. He didn’t admit to himself that he was already tired from his shift and he was about to endure another eight hours!

            Being responsible or maybe just nervous about the new job, Kirk arrived at the production line a half an hour early not taking the whole hour break. From his assigned job where he endured the continually hot, dry, dusty with overtones of oil fumes atmosphere, he stepped into an entirely different working environment. As he had sampled before, the smell of wet paper and fabric with the heat and humidity just about overwhelming him. Kirk was not good with extreme heat and humidity. Then adding the noise of hundreds of rollers spinning beneath the board, the scraping noise above of the heavy paper that sandwiched the board along with gurgling of the goopy gypsum was all omnipresent proving enough to overwhelm Kirk right off the bat. And this was where he had to work for eight hours.

                Being at the second job position early, Kirk had a chance to get a “lay of the land” so to speak. An older guy worked at the position that Kirk supposed he had to assume. The guy, Mike, pretty much sat there the entire half an hour as the lower heavy paper rolled by as the thick layer of wet gypsum foamy plaster gooped on. This goopy plaster mix was affectionally and descriptively called the “mud.” Kirk saw that Mike’s knees poised inches from the spinning rollers which bothered him a bit. Following the briskly moving mud down the line, the upper layer of paper got applied a little further down with the goopy plaster slurry mud getting sandwiched to the correct thickness before setting up a little before heading into the ovens to bake into drywall boards. Kirk wondered how anyone could do anything with the line moving so fast. Typically, he remained never adroit at interacting with anything at speed, well, except maybe on the speedway track.

            Given the “quick and dirty” of the job, Kirk hung around to watch until Mike surrendered the chair. Mike handed Kirk the well-worn but very sharp knife and showed Kirk a couple different trowels stuck in a slot below the level of the constantly moving production line. Everything, the knife, the trowels, the chair, including Mike had plaster coating them. Matt came by for the shift change standing on the other side of the moving slurry-covered paper.

            “You got it, Mister Biscuit?” Matt shouted over the noise.

            “I think so,” Kirk shouted back. “Mike told me a lot. He said about making sure the slurry is even and the nozzles stay open.”

            “Sounds good. Did he tell you about the red cord?”

            Kirk looked around and down. He saw a cord caked with dried plaster. He shook his head. “Ah, no. He didn’t.”

            “See that cord right along the rollers? That’ll shut down the whole line if pulled.” Kirk saw that it was indeed red at one time. “Don’t pull it unless someone tells you to. Something really has to go bad because we can take quite a few bad board feet rather than stopping and really jamming up the works.”

            “Okay.”

            “Main thing: Make sure the slurry is even and all the nozzles are discharging. Careful to make sure the splices between paper rolls go through smoothly without hangups.”

            “Yep, Mike told me that.”

            “You’ll be fine. Hardly anything ever goes Tango Uniform�"ah, that means really wrong.”

            “Yeah, I know.”

            After all that, Kirk really got nervous. All the other jobs weren’t production stoppers as far as he knew and this position felt to Kirk to be a pivotal in making sure they made good drywall which was what the whole plant was all about. It didn’t help that Kirk spotted his father down on the other end of the line. He didn’t know what his father’s position amounted to because he never cared and his father never talked about it probably because Kirk didn’t care. Kirk just hoped they didn’t have to work together.

            Well, the evening started out just fine. With a bit of finesse, Kirk learned how to make sure the mud stayed evenly spread across the mud-covered paper. It was nearly impossible to reach the far side of the paper because of the moving mud and the spinning rollers. Even if he needed to get around, he’d have to go about twenty yards in either direction to get across and by then whatever was wrong would have traveled out of range. Kirk did his best, but the evening dragged on�"and on. They had one paper splice and Kirk managed to trim the edges like he was told. Nozzles clogged now and then and Kirk got them cleaned out pretty easily. At first, he had thought that he’d jut get his hands and wrist muddy, but as the shift progressed, he gained splatters of mud on his sleeves, shirt and pants. Yuck! Though it did harden with time and flaked off.

            Speaking of being dead dog tiredness, after the two shifts Kirk dragged himself out to his van. He knew ahead of time that there wouldn’t be much of a physical toll on his body, but the mental toll was a whole other thing. He had to remain attentive entirely for both shifts and the fact that the one shift used a completely different set of skills, he felt like he had to really expect the unexpected because he wasn’t 100 percent sure what to expect, you know? Tired and hungry as he drove home, Kirk’s stomach soured thinking that he only had eight hours before doing it all again. Hardly enough time to settle down, eat something and sleep enough to be able to hit it again. But as we know Kirk, he wasn’t one to back down from a commitment and as far as he knew there wasn’t a backup to take his place. Kirk knew as always, he’d persevere.

            Tuesday. Hard at work, Kirk put in his time trying to cut corners and take it easy where he could on his usual assigned job. For being a relatively young guy compared to the other workers, Kirk working his one-up position he labored as his own boss which only made Kirk feel all that more responsible to make sure the job was done correctly without a slipup. That meant not slipping into those deadly holes as well. Part two of his double-shift job started out fine and continued all right until close to quitting time when one of the mud nozzles plugged up bad.

            Kirk worked frantically at cleaning for maybe a minute while filling in the gap it made at the same time. Suddenly, he realized he was losing the battle and yelled out, “Hey! Got a plug.”

            Two guys came running, took a quick look and took action. They turned up the flow rate of the other nozzles and told Kirk to even out the heavy mud around the clogged nozzle. Kirk, out of the corner of his eye, saw they moved levers and wiggled hoses and such. They cleaned the clogged nozzle again that Kirk had cleaned already which bothered him a bit, but he let it go under the circumstances. Suddenly, Whoosh! The clogged burst forth with a spray of water and thin mud all over Kirk. He felt like swearing at them for not warning him, but he kept working. Just as suddenly the nozzle burped and started spewing good mud again in hiccups before evening out.

            The evening boss took a marker walked down the line marking about twenty feet of soaking wet wall board. They readjusted the flow and went back to whatever they had been doing before the clog but not before making sure Kirk knew to keep the nozzles open. He wanted to tell them that he knew that and had worked hard to keep them open, damn it! Of course, he was an ignorant new guy, but he didn’t say what he wanted to. He motored on through the remainder of the shift without another hitch. At home, he collapsed and fell into sleep after a hot shower to remove the plaster mud from his body.

            It seemed instantaneous that he experienced a nightmare about mud avalanches overwhelming him, drywall paper rips and all sorts of industrial drywall nightmare scenarios. Mud gooping all over, rollers spinning, and the hot mess called drywall-making work haunted him. BANG! He physically jumped. He hardly got any sleep as he tried to force himself to think about happy things like happy, playful Sarah E. but his dreamland devolved into his bitterness of lost love with Dee. He rolled over and over more often than a chicken rotisserie.

            Wednesday. Rap! Rap! Rap! Made Kirk jump out of bed, knowing he must be almost late for work if his mother banged on the ceiling with the broom handle. He rolled out of bed, feet on the cold floor, pulled up his pants, pulled a tee-shirt over his head, and wrapped a flannel shirt around him that he knew that he’d shed as soon as he get to work. He moved at a steady pace despite being sudden shocked and adrenalized. His mom had a cup of coffee poured and his favorite cereal out, Life. Kirk, in his foggy, sleep-deprived mind, thought the cereal was somehow representative of living crunchy fun at first and then soggy and distasteful later in life.

               Working like Kirk was at the moment would be more than likely a way of life for him and his wife if he had married Dee at an early age and having a young one to care for. Instead, his mind returned to why he had presently ended up dog tired and that reason was that his racing engine was being built at the machine shop. A shock went up his spine when he spied the time on the Felix the Cat clock with its eyes and tail going from side to side with every precious passing second. He gobbled the remaining soggy sludge of his cereal and put the rest of the coffee down burning his throat in the process. Too hot! He trotted out,  jumped into his van and sped out the gravel driveway stones a-flying. He rubbed his eyes. Would he make through the week? The old guys at the plant bragged about going weeks, even months doing double shifts. Kirk just hoped he made it through this one, single, solitary week.

            Thursday. Kirk rolled out of bed just knowing that the banging on the ceiling by his mother would occur any second. That jolt of loud noise when asleep rendered him annoyed to no end, but to underscore her compassion, she always did her best to keep him on track. He hurriedly got his clothes on and pounded his way downstairs. Felix the clock showed that Kirk had gotten up half an hour early. He groaned eternally for missing that additional half an hour of sleep. His mother greeted him a new morning sitting behind a plate of runny fried eggs. Kirk could feel his stomach convulse and the bile rise in his throat. He detested the look and smell of eggs. Fried chicken embryos as the Coneheads would say. At least he could wake up slowly with his coffee and cereal, but after a couple sips and a few spoonsful he felt himself nodding off with his face coming awfully close to him drowning in his milky bowl. He rubbed his gritty, dry eyes. Sucking back a second cup of coffee that he missed dearly on Wednesday, Kirk moseyed on out to his van and leisurely drove to work.

            Kirk took command of his upper floor kiln monitoring shift with an attitude of yet another “here we go again.” This attitude previously caused him that near death experience, but he now incorporated those changes that made the job more labor intensive but inherently safer. He pressed on through the eight hours basically brain-dead autopilot. After his normal shift, he downed a couple cups of black stomach-destroying vending machine coffee that he had to have to make it through another eight hours. Flashes of his catastrophic scenario nightmares haunted his conscious judgements as he went about playing in the slurry gypsum mud. Kirk never liked getting filthy as we witnessed when he worked as a mechanic, but he realized after three days there was no avoiding the splatters of mud apparently integral with the position. All went well with him avoiding any major nozzle clogs or necessary edge trims. In the middle of his shift with Kirk just hanging on to cognizance of his job, the shout came up that they were splicing a new bottom roll of paper. They always announced when a slice occurred because it presented a potentially problematic situation where everything could go pear shaped. Within seconds, Kirk could see the splice coming up the line just on the other side of the mud nozzle array.

            Yep, disaster struck!

            Kirk didn’t know until afterwards what exactly happened or why it occurred. But when the paper splice, remember it’s four feet wide and continuous long as the eye can see, hit the nozzles a paper tearing sound occurred. In a second, Kirk could see the trashy floor beneath in a gap where the mud covered paper was supposed to cover it and that gap grew. His first thought arose to grab the emergency cord and shut the line down, but he hadn’t had to do that before and all his befuddled brain recalled was that someone had to tell him to pull the cord. Frantic, he dipped his hands right into the erupting mud that spilled on the floor. He could not see or feel the piece of paper that had stuck in the nozzle for a second then he did feel it. Holding the ripped heavy paper with one hand, he grabbed the knife and began slicing through the stuck paper, pulling chunks of mud-covered paper out and throwing them out behind him. He did notice that his arms and upper body were caked with mud. Distracted with this observation, he suddenly had a shock of pain in his hand that was working at digging out shards of paper. Withdrawing his hand, his blood colored the mud in red and pink. With his hands covered in mud, he didn’t know what had happened to his hand, but he knew it must have been bad by the amount of blood in the mud. He realized that he had all five fingers, but other than that he didn’t know why he bled.

            “HELP! NEED A SHUT DOWN!” Kirk shouted.

            As men ran to look at the situation, Kirk pulled his shirt out of his pants and wrapped it around his hand. He didn’t want to look. As soon as one worker saw the situation, he pulled the cord and everything, the mud from the nozzles dumping on the floor, and the whole damn line, top and bottom paper. Men came from all around, more than Kirk realized worked in the area.

            One guy shouted, “WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?”

            Kirk could only say sheepishly, “Nothing. I didn’t cause it.”

            On the fringes of the melee of men, Kirk caught sight of his father who just hung in shadows probably because he didn’t want to take any of the loud vituperation directed at “his boy.”

            As the workers pulled the balled-up paper from the muddy nozzle array, the shift supervisor noticed Kirk standing back away holding his hand with the blood soaking through his shirt.

            “What happened to your hand, are you okay?”

            “I’m not sure,” Kirk gave him his grim grin. “I’m afraid to look.”

            “C’mon, Kirk,” he said in an even tone. “Let’s go to the breakroom and see what you injured.”

            At the break room, there was a large filthy sink. The supervisor ran the water, checking the temperature.

            “Wash that mud off so we can see.”

            Kirk pulled his mud-caked hand from his shirt as blood dripped. He stuck his hand under the warm water and gasped with the pain of the water running on it. He still wouldn’t look.

            “Not so bad, Kirk, considering the blood,” the supervisor said, taking his hand and turning it so he could see it completely. “It appears you sliced your little finger. Hmmm, right from the tip, through your fingernail right down into the quick.” He grabbed some paper towels from the nearby dispenser and handed them to Kirk. “Here wrap up your finger; I’ll fetch the first aid kit.” Which hung by the door.

            As the supervisor cleaned Kirk’s finger, applied antibiotic cream, wrapped it with gauze, and applied a couple layers of tape, he inquired into the incident.

            “So, how’d you do this?”

            Kirk gave his signature shrug. “I had both hands in the mud, cutting and pulling out the stuck paper from under the nozzles.”

            “Huh. It stuck before you done anything?”

            “Yeah, the paper ripped and the mud was dropping on the floor.”

            “Okay. How’d you cut your finger then?”

            Kirk shrugged again. “I couldn’t see what I was doing in the mud. I think I must have sliced my own finger.”

            The supervisor took a deep inhalation. “Well, it could’ve been worse. Much worse. Do you need to see a doctor?”

            “Naw,” Kirk said looking at his fat wrapped finger. “I want to get back to work.”

            The supervisor let out a breath seemingly relieved. “Okay, we need to fill out an accident report after the shift. Okay?”

            “Yeah, sure.”

            “I’m pretty sure I know who dropped the ball on the splice. The splices should never be loose or catch. I think they failed to tape down the edges of the splice. That won’t happen again!”

            Kirk was wondering if the guy would be fired, but said nothing.

            “You good enough to get back to work?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Just know that if you want to see a doctor, go ahead. The plant will pay for everything.”

            “Okay, thanks.”

            When he returned to his area, a couple of the guys gave him the “look” that the supervisor caught.

            “Mister Biscuit here didn’t do anything wrong. It wasn’t his fault,” the supervisor said, turning to look aside at a couple workers. “Mister Biscuit, I know they told you not to pull the cord, but in your position, if anything gets that bad pull the cord and stop the line. No problem.”

                  Kirk felt a bit relieved after that advice and tried to help with the cleanup. About five guys with wheelbarrows scooped up the muddled pile of mud and paper while others cut the paper off clean and then began the process of pulling the clean new paper up through the line. Kik saw, yeah, a stoppage like what he just experienced really made a massive mess.

            It took only about twenty-five minutes of downtime to get up and running again. They started the paper going first, then gradually turned up the mud nozzles to a near usual enough rate. As the new board got pressed down the line, they tweaked the mud until the consistency and thickness ran right. They were back in the normal business of making drywall.

            After his shift, despite being muddy, dirty, and bloody operating with gritty, tired eyes and head, Kirk sat down with his supervisor to fill out the report. Kirk didn’t have anything else to put on the report other than what he had already said, so just filling in the personal info, time and place took up enough time to finish up. Kirk felt more than ready to go home.  

            Despite the later hour at home, his father still sat up eating his toast with his mother. Kirk’s father seemed rather indifferent to Kirk’s injury, but his mother who was usually overly empathic and benevolent exhibited her concern. Being an unemotive guy, Kirk detested when his mother got all touchy feely over him like a five year old with  skinned knee. He was no baby and told her as much. He just wanted to be left alone so he could go to bed. His cut finger throbbed to no end, bothering him during the night, but he eventually slept quite well.

            Friday. Being injured made it hard to break up the dry gypsum clogs above the kilns causing him pain when gripping the long scraper rods, but he endured just the same. Working just seemed different after his injury and the work stopping shut down of the line, but he couldn’t place his finger on what was different especially with his little finger on why he felt so different. That was until it dawned on him that even though he knew it was Friday, the last day of his double shifts, he realized Friday was really the end of the hard, nearly sleepless week of double shifts. Kirk knew he couldn’t go on a single more day like that. Still, still and all, Friday’s shifts went by slowly but uneventful.

            Work the next week with single shifts seemed to go by like a breeze and he determined that double shifts were not in the cards for him, though he still had that big expense to pay out there, silently lurking on his mind. A week later, he volunteered for weekend shifts that amounted to laborer type work like painting the office, the breakroom and other special out-of- the-ordinary tasks. On pay day, he couldn’t believe how much more tax they took out of his double shift week, but hey babe, it’s America at the workplace.

            Kirk would be changed after that week, mentally and physically with his finger and nail never growing back normally. So, we have to say it: Kirk was Never the Same after that week.