Each morning we used files to sharpen the sickles and more o

Each morning we used files to sharpen the sickles and more of us got cut sharpening than doing the work.

The summer after my senior year, when I showed up, they asked who among us had taken mechanical drawing in high school. One other guy, Reagan Newton, and I had and we were chosen for a special assignment. We were to work in the office building making small scale drawings of every vessel with ‘as build’ locations of all connections. This entailed getting the ‘as designed’ drawing, making a copy on the Xerox machine (a brand new invention at that time), taking this drawing into the plant, finding the real vessel and making notations on the photocopy. Then we would go back to the office (air conditioned) and make the ‘as build’ drawings.

I also went to the ethylene cracking furnaces and recorded the firebox temperatures for each furnace and plotted them on a graph for the operations guys.

This was a pretty good job and when Reagan and I went to the time shack to clock out, we were still pretty clean while our colleagues were filthy having been cutting grass in the ditches all day.