Laborer Dog

Every new Railroad Maintenance of Way Employee is assigned a Seniority Roster number on the day they are hired. This Laborers Date is the common denominator for all employees. Everyone goes on to get qualified on the various machines or they move up the management track to become Foreman or Roadmaster but they all start with a Laborer’s Date that determines their place in line.

This seniority date is always referred to as the Laborer’s Date. No one ever asks “When did you hire out?”, or “What’s your seniority date?”, it is always; “What’s your Laborer’s Date”. The reason this is so important has to do with an obscure Union ritual known as bumping.

Bumping is an unbelievably bizarre result of the Union implementation of the Seniority Roster at any cost resulting in chain reaction of bumping as each person finds someone to displace every time there is a layoff. So it is the Laborers Date that determines who can bump who when times get tough as they do every winter when the Production Gangs get laid off and everyone scrambles to find a spot on a Section Gang in the maddening game of musical chairs played out up and down the line.

The term Laborer Dog is used with equal amounts of affection and derision depending on who is aiming or receiving the insult or compliment as the case may be, but it could be used on anyone all the way from the biggest Bigshot on down to the newest wannabe, because they all have that one thing in common.

Some people had a hard time going back to their starting position and would spend more time complaining about the work than actually working but the rest of us found a way to make it pay. And to this day I still respect any one working hard for a living and I am always proud to think of myself as a Laborer Dog.

The Railroader’s Lament

I’m a Trackman sure, there ain’t no cure, I’ve got curve grease in my veins.

I can’t stay away so I go every day, with sore knees and knuckles and lower back pains.

All day I stare at the rails glare , I dream about cross ties at night.

And before I’m through I promise you, I’ll put up a hell of a fight.

The pick and the shovel, the maul and the level, these are the tools of my trade.

The jack and the tongs, the Railroad Songs, of this is what I am made.

I always likes to drive some spikes, my arms measure perfect gage.

There ain’t much dough, and somehow I know, I’ll never die of old age.

Redemption of The Bad Pastry Chef

There are plenty of scientists investigating the questions about our planets changing surface. There are Geologists digging for answers about Earthquakes and Volcanoes while the Chemists figure out the formula for future success in managing everything from our outer atmosphere to our inner core. Then come the Biologists and Oceanographers followed by GPS surveyors and Google mappers to the point where the field is so crowded there is barely room left for another analyst from the Scientific perspective. But there is still room for the Crossover Consultant.

There are many examples of the Crossover Consultant making great discoveries by accident while in pursuit of an unrelated solution. Columbus found us before we even knew we were lost, the formula for vulcanizing rubber was from spilling the wrong ingredients and it is well known that penicillin was never the goal when it was first found.

So it turns out that any old Baker can offer vital assistance to those Scientists studying our planet. You might think that only the very best Baker could make this leap but in fact any Good Bakers would never make these discoveries because the genius is in making mistakes. In the end it is only a Bad Baker who can cut the mustard so to speak.

Have you ever opened the oven too soon while a cake is baking and then it “drops”? Well that same thing can happen on global scale leading to a giant earthquake as damaging as a large asteroid. Have you ever seen a pie crust rise too high leaving a large hollow that collapses when you start to cut the first piece? Well that same thing can happen to our plate tectonics with continental consequences. Who else but the Bad Pastry Chef can reveal these mysteries to those science guys?

The Steppes of the Far East? Stacks of pancakes. The Badlands of Montana? Peanut Brittle. The Louisiana Bayou? Chocolate Mouse. The Grand Tetons? Well, they can’t all be kitchen cliché’s.

Forget Hands Across America. All we need to do is get everyone to jump up and down at the junction of the Four Corner states and we can get a brand new Grand Canyon.

The Four Philosophies of Love

We’ve all heard of the four basic food groups but who knew there were four basic love groups in the world? In honor of Valentine’s Day herewith are the four personality types that make up the world’s lovers.

The first group thinks they control love completely. They not only manage who they choose to love but also who is allowed to love them. This group is the most stable if least dynamic.

The last group thinks they can’t control love at all. They never get a handle on love, not for giving their own to others, or receiving the same from anyone in return. For this group love is a complete mystery. This group enjoys the greatest rate of change if they can just avoid turning love into turmoil.

In between these two extremes are the other two one-way-street groups of people. One of these one-way types thinks they can control their own love but never the love of others. While the other one-way group thinks they can control who loves them, but not who they love. These two groups are the ones who keep falling in love with the wrong people all the time. Without this group Valentine’s Day would go broke.

The truth is love cannot be controlled and must be let loose to run free forever and not just one day a year.

The Spotted Owl Controversy

In the early 1980’s the logging industry came under fire from the Environmentalist Groups for threatening the Spotted Owl. There were mills closing down due to greater economic conditions but both the tree huggers and the burly loggers were sure the cause of all their troubles were wrapped up in that little bird. There were pictures in the news and we all knew one at a glance after the first couple of years of constant coverage of the story so you can imagine my surprise when I ran into one on the Railroad one day.

At first we marveled at the discovery as if it were a dinosaur or dodo bird but then later on in another location we found another. And before long another in an altogether different area and soon enough we found this foul to be rather common. How else could it get so much attention? If it was really as rare as portrayed in the news it should hardly ever be seen but in fact it is seen everywhere and that is precisely why it has so many enthusiasts who pity the plight of the poor creature.

We even got to witness the curious behavior of one of these birds who has flown to close to a passing train and ended up uninjured on the ground. We know it was uninjured because it flew away in the end but when we first saw it we thought it was injured by the way it was flapping along on the ground. After a while we realized it was hopping with intent along with the flapping, and soon enough it was able to clamber up a tree and stand on a limb. It was then and only then that the creature was able to fly off in the natural way with its long wings swooping way below the body.

We saw the hopping Spotted Owls more than once as it seems they had a habit of flying near passing trains, or trucks on the highway. In our travels maintaining the railroads in Northern California and Western Oregon we found more spotted owls than most other critters combined. There were some larger herds of Antelope and Elk, plenty of deer and rabbits but the Spotted Owl may well outnumber them all. Sure they couldn’t match the big numbers put up by the Starlings and Geese, or even Robins and Blue Jays but those darned Spotted Owls had representatives in every corner of every county as far as we could tell.