My Graduation from Weenie to Worker

From late 1978 'til early 1980, I worked for an engineering firm in Omaha. Water treatment. Sewage treatment. I’d just quit working for Trailways, American Bus Lines, as lead transportation supervisor and camped out for a few days at the employment bureau. The guy who was assigned my case was used to people registering for unemployment compensation visiting next door at employment because it was a requirement to draw your check. After a couple days he realized I really wanted work and began to review the screens for me as soon as a job became available. He sent me out to western Omaha to interview for the “order expediter” job at HEMCO. Carl took my application and did the interview. Carl was office manager. Carl was tall and thin, dark-haired and whip smart. He just couldn’t keep up with all the orders the firm had outstanding and needed somebody to work full time just calling the manufacturers to get the orders expedited. He worked with three engineers who were in the process of buying the firm from Whitey Menshing, who had recently retired. Whitey was the prior and nominal owner of the H.E. Menshing Company, or HEMCO. After calling my references and saying ”well, you haven’t burned any bridges and people at your old job said you were conscientious,” he offered me the job. I tightened up with my employment counselor with a fifth of Jack Daniels black label. I was glad to be employed again and set up working at a desk next to Carl and began the job of moving our orders forward and getting them fulfilled.

Within a month the guy who did inside sales took a flyer when he experienced an early life crisis. He wasn't old enough for midlife crisis but he blew town anyway. I moved into his old office and did order expediting and inside sales. I learned how to design blower packages using engineering manuals and how to specify mostly submersible pumps. We were the manufacturing representative for Flygt pumps from Sweden, probably the best submersible pumps in the world. I also sold water measuring equipment using flumes and weirs. I had my own take off table to do the design work. I had never considered being an engineer but working for the firm and with the other engineers was both fun and stimulating. In another month I began working with our shop to assemble the stands, motors, and blowers which I had specified for sale and which were put together in house prior to shipping. I got to know Eric Wren, our shop foreman fairly well and got to like him and the other mechanics. Eric was amazed by our maintenance manager who would take on jobs in the field, go out and camp out in various cities in Nebraska and Iowa taking what seemed like forever to do a job. His name was Ole or Swen or something. I forget. He was a big Scandinavian guy with blonde hair. He’d get up late, have coffee and hang out a lot. Ole went to the same church as our lead engineer, Bob Frisk, and was thought of as his friend. Whether this friendship caused the manager to feel he could be comfortable or not about skylarking on the job was the question of the day. I got tired of listening to Eric complain about him, so I braced Bob in his office about it and told him the shop could get these projects finished in under a week. We’d send more than one guy and save some money. It was taking closer to a month and some jobs never got done. Bob called his friend in to his office when he got back from his latest field work and discussed it with him and the friend got mad and quit. Beginning Monday the next week I was order expediter, inside sales manager and service manager. When I came in Monday to assume the role, Bob told me Eric wanted to see me in the shop. I dressed in shirt and tie, like the other office weenies. I learned in the Air Force there were two kinds of employees, office workers, who did all the work and office weenies, who wore shirts and ties and sat around and drank coffee all day. The workers were the enlisted and non-coms. The weenies were the officers. Eric, a worker, was waiting for me, a weenie, at a work bench. He had a small submersible pump pulled apart in pieces called the impeller, the volute, the rotor, and the stator. I watched him work for a couple of minutes and he said “so you’re taking over the shop?” I told him only with his help. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I knew enough to take over without a ton of help. One of the reasons I did it was to empower the guys working in the shop to get the job done better and quicker. He said “maybe. Let’s see what you know about pumps.” He offered up the greasy, oily middle of a bearing area for me to look at it. I took it from him, looked at it and tried to describe as best I could what I thought it did. He shrugged and nodded and took the part back from me and offered me a rag to wipe my hands. He said I could go back in and finish up with Bob on the job offer. After going back inside Bob explained Eric didn’t expect me to know it all, he just expected me to be willing to get my hands dirty and make a good faith effort. I wouldn’t be much of a worker but I wasn’t all weenie either since I was willing to get my hands dirty. I had passed Eric’s test and would now be considered the “acting” shop manager.

Every few weeks HEMCO would take on big jobs designing water and sewage treatment plants and working with the construction companies to build them. We also refurbished older plants. That and represent manufacturers of equipment that ran these plants. Getting these jobs was a majority of what our three engineers, Bob, Dean and Jim did. It was the engine that moved our company forward. The shop supported these big jobs and we actually would do some the smaller STP (sewage treatment plant) refurbishments in house. One of the other big jobs the shop tackled was cleaning STPs which had been allowed to stop working properly and overflow or freeze up.  One my first field operations was to take on the job paid for by the Jimmie Dean Pork Sausage STP in Shenandoah, Iowa. We got the call that the plant’s own STP had quit working and began discharging raw sewage to the town’s own STP causing it to overflow. The town’s plant needed to be cleaned up and put back in order. We put together a crew of a couple of mechanics, an electrician and some local high schoolers who traveled with us to help do some of the heavy labor. We loaded three trucks and a fifth wheel with various pumps and devices used to clean a digester. As we prepped for the job I asked Eric if he knew where the plant was or had ever been there. Eric said he found them without a map, en route, most times. Eric didn’t believe in instructions or maps. He figured he could figure things out without a drawing and if he couldn’t he wouldn’t want to fool with it anyway. He had never needed instructions to assemble anything. Eric had been in the Navy when I was in the Air Force. I was a computer operator. Eric worked on nuclear submarines. He was the first guy to suit up and go in when the reactor was malfunctioning. Eric was a very good mechanic. When we got to Shenandoah, I was interested to see how we were going to find the STP.  Eric said in his experience, most town's local STPs were run by the Mayor’s brother-in-law, who wouldn’t be there. This was normally why we had to clean things up. The brother-in-law had the job to collect his check and little else. Most BILs figured the plants ran themselves. Many did, for a little while anyway. So rule one was the Mayor’s BIL was in charge but wouldn’t be there. The second STP rule was that it would be located on the south side of town, adjacent to a river running north to south, where it discharged into the stream what was supposed to be treatment effluent. This was pretty much the way it was everywhere he went.

Eric pointed our lead truck toward the south side of town and when we were a mile or so from the river, we saw a black cloud on the horizon. I had never seen a black cloud before. In a couple minutes we were within a block and the overflow from the flies was making it’s way into our trucks. We rolled up the windows and pulled into the industrial area where the STP was located. The sky was darkened from several thousand flies that were circling the top of the STP’s digester. The pig offal from the feed lot runoff had traveled through the pork sausage plant’s STP untouched and went into this small town plant, overwhelming it and then filled the sewer digester to the top and then overflowed everywhere. Our crew sat in their trucks, dumbfounded. The digester was covered in liquid, tan pig shit and lord knows what other processed pig entrails from the slaughter house. The fly maggots covered the pig shit in thousands of white dollops.

One thing about management I learned in the Air Force. Your men expect you to lead, not follow. I had to get out of our truck and stand there batting away the flies. I had been on one other job prior this one to clean a digester at an institution in Iowa. The mental patients at the institution had flushed shredded sheets down the toilets over and over and had clogged the digester. It was a pretty simple job and Eric taught me about digesters there. Most digesters we visited were anaerobic, which meant sealed off from outside air and oxygen. The bugs inside the digester broke down the treated sewage, or sludge. The process gave off methane, which when combined with oxygen was explosive. Methane, is quite simply, natural gas. The methane could be piped off and used as natural gas. The first job that needed to be accomplished at any anaerobic digester was to vent the digester to atmosphere and allow the methane to bleed off for several hours until our sniffers detected very low presence of gas and it would be safe to go inside. You could normally go inside a digester and walk around a cat walk to see what the sludge looked like inside the digester. This one was overflowing however and there would be no gas as the offal had displaced all the gas inside with liquid. It wasn't sludge inside, it was raw sewage. It still had to be opened however and we had to work at locating all the top ports to lower our pumps inside to pump out the pig juice. I wore the uniform of our shop, as we had Cintas outfit me with the same uniform as the rest of the mechanics. Bob said he had an old friend in the business who always wore white suits to job sites involving sewage. Not sure what the point was there but Eric said we wore navy blue. I also had on leather engineering boots that I wore when I rode my motorcycle. While everybody stood around and discussed what a shitty job this was, I began climbing the ladder up to the top of the digester and when I got there began crawling through the pig shit and maggots at a 45 degree angle to get to the top of the digester vent to open it. Halfway up I realized Eric was right behind me and when we got to the port we spun the wheel together to open the hatch. I can still smell it. Once we came back down the guys had already hooked up the fire hoses and hosed Eric and I off and began the job of hosing off the digester so we could get a crane to pick up the pumps and drop them into the digester to begin the job of pumping out the pig offal. Guys don’t hesitate to pitch in when they see you’re there with them.

Working at HEMCO was fun and exciting. It was also dangerous. Working with sewage can make you sick. We worked out of doors in below zero temperatures where water froze if it stopped moving for more than a second. We did the huge digester in Iowa City and worked a couple in January when it was 15 below. Riding in the back of a truck at the end of the day meant risking frostbite.

While working to rehab a small STP in Walthill, Nebraska, I climbed up and down a wet well a dozen times. Walt Hill had been an Indian agent on the Omaha Indian reservation there. The town bore his name, just concatenated from Walt Hill to Walthill. I had on many layers of clothes and two pairs of gloves, the outer pair of which was rubber coated. It was about 5 below zero. The wet well was over 25 feet deep. It was made of concrete sections with a metal ladder running down one wall. The cover was flipped open all the way so I could get in an out quickly. I had to go to the bottom to adjust the float switches and come back up and go inside to run the pumps to see if I had the adjustment done properly. The inside pump controls were in a control room. You would climb a short set of ladders over to the top of the wet well which was a concrete platform about 12 x 12. The well was on the south side of the plant and adjacent to the control rooms. it just went down into the ground another floor or so below the rest of the plant. So you went up a floor to access the well from the plant and then climbed down the ladder into the well to get to the bottom. Overall it was about two stories from the top to the bottom of the well. At first it was pretty scary to look down all that way from the top to the darkness of the bottom but after you go up and down a few times, you acclimate. Having the lid open aided in seeing the bottom. Because it was a pain to set your feet down the narrow rungs of the metal ladder embedded into the concrete while putting your hands on the upper rungs, I put a broom stick handle across the opening of the top. I would grab the broomstick handle with one hand and swing down to put my foot on the lower rung and grab the upper rung with my other hand. Sort of a stretched out monkey grab. It would have made more sense to have one guy down at the bottom shouting up to another guy on top but there were only two of us at the work site and my co-worker was getting the blowers going while I got the pumps working right. We were working short-handed because I had given Eric a hard foul on a layup in a shop basketball game during lunch one day. Eric had welded up a base for the basketball goal and it stuck out below the goal on the floor like a trip hazard. Our shop was like a warehouse and we could play indoor basketball during lunch. When I fouled him as he went in for the layup, he tripped over the steel goal base and broke his foot. It was hard to do field work in a leg cast and I told him we’d switch jobs until his foot healed and the cast was removed. He could do weenie work with a bum foot, just not worker work. And so I found myself running up and down steel rungs embedded into a concrete wet well in Walthill, Nebraska in December.

On what I hoped was my last float level adjustment, I hustled over to the top of the well, I grabbed the broom stick handle with my one rubber-gloved hand and swung forward to the embedded ladder rung a few feet down with my foot as my hand grabbed the topmost rung. Except my bottom foot slipped and my top hand missed and my broom stick hand’s rubber didn’t afford enough grip to hold on by itself and my grip slipped off and I found myself suspended, face up, laterally across the top of the wet well without anything holding me, suspended, very momentarily, in air. At that particular moment I realized I had made a fairly severe tactical mistake and was calculating the possibilities of surviving the fall as gravity quickly took hold of me and I began to see if I could fly backwards without wings. I couldn't fly but I could sure drop. Brain alarms went off when the realization of survival looked dim. Sort of a “feets don’t fail me now” moment without any way to flee the hazard. I’d have the extra adrenaline but no way to use it save flapping my non-existent wings. I began my gradual drifting down and down the well, “flying” backwards, looking upward toward the top, as I descended, affording me a great look at the four walls of the well as I receded down and down and down. My reaction to the situation, spoken internally was, “Oh shit.” It quickly occurred to me that these were not profound last words. I fell and fell and fell. The entirety of my experiences to date seemed to want to play itself forward for me as I fell. Images raced through my mind. It was as if my brain knew I didn’t have long to think, so let’s rethink everything, like an all core dump. It was a fairly amazing experience but all such things are transitory and I hit, flat, with a bone-crushing double thud and blacked out. I came to as the well began filling up. My shoulders had broken the metal support for the float controls and triggered the pumps and sewage was rushing in. My hard hat had cracked on impact and one of the float prongs that held the loop for a float control had passed through my winter coat an inch from my back and I was semi-stuck on it. I knew I had to get up and get out or drown. My problem was my brain told my body to get up and well, things weren’t working so good. At that point it was get up or die and through a lot of swearing and teeth gritting I managed to roll onto my side and then sit up and then get to my knees and grab the bottom ladder rung and begin the very slow and very painful ascent of the ladder. The shock kept the pain at bay but my muscles didn’t want to respond to command. To be honest I don’t remember climbing the ladder at all by this date and working my way up the ladder and onto the concrete deck up top hurt pretty badly and I was doing everything slow motion. I do remember that but when I laid on my back on top and began to freeze in the sub-zero cold I had a sense of elation it’s hard to describe. Either I was experiencing post death experiences or I had cheated death. Either way I felt honored and privileged to be experiencing anything because just a minute before I had no expectation of survival when my rubber glove slipped off the broom stick handle and my other hand just couldn’t quite grip the metal rung of the ladder. For the first time I started to call out for help. I shouted and shouted until my co-worker heard me and came running up to the top of the well from the plant. He saw me laying there and asked what the hell was going on and I told him I had fallen into the well, hit the bottom and then climbed back out. I had a hard time talking and I couldn’t move any more. He just laughed and said “the hell you did. What happened? Why are laying here?” I don’t think he ever believed me. He helped me get inside the control room and I laid down on a table and couldn’t get up. I still have a funny place on the left side of my lower back where something isn’t quite right. I had on tons of clothes because it was so cold and the floor of the wet well was covered in sewage which cushioned my blow. The float prong missed skewering me by an inch and my hard hat kept my head from cracking on impact. Just dumb-assed luck kept me alive, plain and simple.

But back to the pig plant overflow job. When we finished at Shenandoah after two days of pumping orange pig offal into drying beds we loaded the trucks up and began the drive back to Omaha. We pulled over at the first filling station we came to and I went inside to give them the company credit card for all three trucks. The uniformed gas station attended was sitting at an old desk working on a parts order and his mechanic was outside in the shop pulling parts for a car that was in the first bay. As I stood there watching the guys pump the trucks full of gas, I looked at myself in the mirror. My uniform was a clean one but my boots were the same. I needed a shave and I had a few dark areas on my skin that hadn’t cleaned up well. The attended started to sniff the air. He looked at me and looked around and shouted out to the guy in the shop. “Hey, Larry? I thought I told you to dump that bucket out. It still smells terrible in here.” He got no response from Larry but I looked at the guy and said “That smell is me. My boots stink like pig shit and I guess I do too, at this point. Sorry.” I’ll never forget his expression when his eyes got wide and he looked up at me and said. “Hey, mister, I didn’t mean anything with the stink thing, you know?” He was stammering. He was genuinely afraid of me. It was at that point in time when I realized I had finally graduated from weenie to worker.