After eight glorious weeks of freedom, I got rehired.
First thing I did was walk over to the machine shop to look for my F-150. The oil stain was there but the truck wasn’t. It wasn’t in the rock lot where the bulldozers parked either.
Who would have stooped so low as to co-opt that piece of shit? It had no heat and no air-conditioning. The radio bubbled static. Door handles were missing. Floorboards, fenders, and frame all rusted and rotted. It certainly hadn’t been what could be called roadworthy. And, my God, the smell.
I went into the machine shop. One of the welders lifted his hood and told me the bad news—they’d had to move the truck for a rebar delivery and the engine on that old thing finally blew, so the truck got dragged to the scrapyard.
In a dusty corner, I saw a pile of salvaged tools from the truck. I took some wrenches and my tape measure but didn’t see what I was really looking for—my Truck Desk®. Oh well.
I caught a ride out to the unit with the foreman and the rest of the crew. Our goal for the day was to unbolt components from a heat exchanger and fly them off with a crane. Once the exchanger was apart and inspected, we’d begin our real repairs.
The morning went well. The mornings always go well. Everybody knows what they’re doing. We’re professionals, equals. Same pay. Same benefits. All working together toward retirement. We look out for each other. Whoever has the hardest task in this crew today could be the foreman tomorrow, and vice versa. Nobody wants to be the boss, so our bosses are the best kind.
At first break we packed into our truck and drove shoulder-to-shoulder back to the trailer compound for coffee. During the five-minute drive, I couldn’t help but think how good I’d had it when I had the luxury of using that piece of shit F-150.
See, the truck nobody else wanted had been my office. I’d built a portable desk inside it. My truck desk, I called it. A couple of planks screwed together, our union sticker slapped on, the whole deal sealed with shellac. I’d built the desk so it slid into the bottom of the steering wheel and sat across the armrests. I used to hang back at the job and sneak in some creative work while the rest of the crew went to break. My desk—which I’d taken far too long to build and perfect through many prototypes—had been stowed behind the driver’s seat when the truck was hauled off by the wrecker.
Back at the break trailer, I took my old seat and joined in on the jokes, insults, tall tales. That trailer was, to me, the best place for storytelling in the world—but, as always, it was too loud, too raucous, too fun to do any writing or reading, which is all I ever want to do on break. At lunch, I retreated into the relative quiet of the machine shop. I sat down by the drill press and took out my cell phone and started writing. Just like I used to do.
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