Job Description

 

Ha, my girlfriend says I’d do a lot more writing if I didn’t play so many video games. I’m sure she’s right; but I do so love my games. But I promised you an update on my new job, and I’m overdue, so let’s do it.

My Google maps timeline used to have me all over the state of Indiana and the wider region, with occasional jaunts as far as Boston or New York. Now my places visited are only around Bloomington and up to Muncie and Marion, to visit family. Because, of course, I was a truck driver and now I work in a limestone mill; my little corner of the world.

There are several areas that I sometimes work but my main station is at “the splitter,” where limestone slabs of various thicknesses are split with a press into specific dimensions leaving a rough finish to the split edge. The press is housed in a “shed,” about 30’ square, walled on three sides and open in the front. In the winter a tarp can be dropped across the gap but for most of the year it remains open to the light and air. My back is to it most of the time but across the entry drive to the mill grows a stand of hardwoods, with a couple of pine trees thrown in. A bit of natural bedrock peeks out from the embankment on which they grow as well as the jumbled ends of broken and discarded cut stone covered with so much leaf and needle fall that they’ve become a part of the hill. We also store some of our finished product along this hill waiting to be put on a truck, what I used to do.

The stone comes down a conveyor from the press and I pick it up with a vacuum lift, a machine that grabs ahold of the stone by suction and allows me to lift it effortlessly. I then place the stone on a pallet along with other stones of the same dimensions. I sometimes work on as many as three or four different sizes at once, trying to maximize what we can get out of a slab. I send any waste stone down a different conveyor to empty into a steel box which is periodically emptied.

The stone feeds into the splitter via a gravity ramp that extends out the back of the building. Part of my job is to help guide the operator as he positions the raw slabs onto this ramp with a forklift. I then roll them down the ramp, sending one into the building and staging more outside for later. It’s an old ramp, some of the rollers stick and others are missing. It can be tricky coaxing the stone to its destination, particularly the thicker slabs, six inch or greater. I had a lot of trouble when I first started, but like everything; one learns. I once had a small piece that had broken off another slab fall through the opening where a roller was missing. Now I know to position such pieces at an angle to extend their length to bridge the gap.

Powered by gravity the end of the feed ramp is raised about a foot and a half off the ground. Add to this the fact that the splitter shed itself sits on top of a small hill and I have a pretty good view behind the building. To the west I can see across the “Bone Yard,” a flat desert of lime about a quarter of a mile wide, to a line of trees. In the summer my gaze stops there but now, with the trees bare, I can see the roofs of houses in the valley behind our property, and to southwest I can see the stoplight on highway 46 at Curry Pike and little toy cars and trucks moving east and west.

The Bone Yard is lined with stacks of odd stone that weren’t needed at one time but might come in handy later. I assume someone knows what’s out there. Beyond that, on the edge of the yard, are piles of waste stone and lime dust, waiting to be bulldozed over the side, extending the desert a little further. I’m told that we’re just about to the little stream that bounds the property. After that we’ll have to start piling the waste up, make a mountain of lime like the Bybee and 3D mills do.

The Bone Yard extends about three quarters of a mile to the south, but directly south of me the view is dominated by “the New Building.” It’s not new anymore but it’s still called that and in a complex where most of the structures are 80 to 100 years old it is new, having been built about 10 years ago. I sometimes work in the New Building, on the “pitch and drip” line. It’s an automated line that adds a chipped “rockface” to the front of treads and sills, and a condensation channel to sills. It uses a larger version of the vacuum lift to load the stone on one side, and another to pick the stone up again at the end to place onto a pallet. Sometimes pieces are too small to use the lift and must be fed and “caught” by hand. That’s true at the splitter too, on occasion.

The other place that I sometimes work is at the 36-inch saw. It does the same thing that the splitter does except that the surface of the stone is smooth, rather than rough. There are two “beds” on either side of the saw, mounted on rails. When one bed is finished being cut it is moved out from the saw shed and the other is moved in to begin sawing it. The saw sits under the tramway and an overhead crane loads raw slabs onto the beds and lifts the finished stone off them. That’s where I come in. As a “hooker” I help the crane operator to place the slabs on an empty bed and when one comes out I prepare the stone and then guide the operator, who sits in a doghouse up above, to lift the stone and “fly” it over to a pallet. The preparation entails removing waste, arranging the pieces into manageable groups and moving the boards that the cutting was done on so that the straps of the crane can be gotten under the edges of the stone to lift it.

One thing about working in a stone mill: you’re either working hard, or hardly working. There’s a lot of down time while you wait for processes to complete before you jump in to do your part. That’s especially true at the 36-inch saw. It can only go so fast through a piece of limestone and if it’s a big slab being cut into small pieces it can take a long time. Part of a hooker’s job is to keep the mill supplied with various items that are used regularly. We make many of our own pallets, sticks need to be cut to go under prepared pieces so that the crane straps can be gotten out, and homosote, cellulite board used to cushion the stone, needs to be cut into various sizes. There’s a table saw down by the 36 to do all of that. Still, there’s only so much of that one can do. I get a lot of reading in, which isn’t bad, but time goes quicker when the work is steady, and then I get to feeling like I’m being interrupted when it’s time to work again.

Most of the year the work is steady at the splitter. (Once I was unhappy sitting around at the 36 but when I went back up to the splitter I realized I was going to have to work again; never satisfied!) But now that it’s winter each slab needs to be warmed up before it can be run, or it doesn’t split well. I can get some more reading in.

It’s 50/50 in the New Building. If you’re on the line and there’s stone to run then it’s ok, but if you’re just an extra hand or there isn’t any stone cut it’s miserable. The foreman of the New Building takes a dim view of workers doing something for themselves on company time. He doesn’t care if what you’re doing is worthless or redundant, long as it’s not pleasurable. I should mention that doesn’t apply to him or Steve, the 64-inch saw operator, which is housed in the New Building. They spend a lot of time sitting at the picnic table joking around.

It’s understandable paying workers during down times. Like those guys on the road crew leaning on their shovels. They aren’t needed at the moment, but they will be needed shortly, and it can’t be done without them. I’m grateful that for the most part I can use that down time to my advantage. But what’s even better is that even if there’s legitimately nothing for me to do, they are willing to pay me just to be there, so that I can get my hours in. They don’t have to do that, and I appreciate it. The other day the splitter operator had to stay home with a sick child. The New Building was fully staffed and the 36 wasn’t running. I wasn’t asked to leave; I was put into the New Building as an extra hand. I asked if I could go home and was told OK. It’s too much work trying to find something to look busy at. I would have been practically in the way!

So that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a lot more, of course, both about the mill and about my part in it. I like it well enough, and I’m proud to be a part of the storied limestone industry. It’s just a line job but there are elements of craftsmanship involved; knowing the stone and how to make it behave or trimming it with a hammer and chisel when it doesn’t split right. I’m learning new things all the time.

I used to strap my loads down up by the splitter when I would pick up there at Hoadley, back when I was a driver. I remember watching the guy who had my job and thinking, “What a boring job!” There was a lot of “sour grapes” in that. Now that I’m in the job I see that there’s a lot more to it than I imagined, and when it comes down to it, I’m super glad that I’m not driving any longer. I can’t tell you how glad I am that that nightmare is over with.

Of course drivers are in demand right now and able to garner some high wages. I would have been stuck with Stone Belt in any case, as the job that I had there was the first and only driving job that I’ve ever seen that gave me a full weekend off. But even if I got another raise and there hadn’t been any personality conflicts I would still be better off where I am now. I was a little apprehensive when I got my first paycheck. It hadn’t been entirely clear what I’d be making, I just knew that it was an opportunity and I wanted to quit driving. It turned out that I was making two dollars more an hour than I had been at Stone Belt, and I’ve gotten a dollar fifty an hour raise since, plus two $1,000 bonuses. I couldn’t believe it; I got my first bonus when I’d only been there for three weeks. Thank my lucky stars! How many people get a raise when they do a career change?

The only thing that I want to add right now is to tell you about the bobcat. No, not the small utility vehicle, we have one of those. We have a real bobcat, a wild predator, that calls Hoadley home. It’s been seen several times, by several different people. I haven’t seen it there at work, but I unmistakably saw a bobcat attempt to cross the road on walnut street where it climbs the hill between Cascades Park and Griffy Lake. It turned around and dashed back into the woods when it saw me coming. That’s close enough that it could have been the same cat, but then again, we know that there are more of them in the area because our bobcat has kittens, and somebody must be the father. We’re not within city limits, but we’re not far out either. I think it’s great that something so wild could be living so close, beneath our very noses.

 

P.S. I'll add a picture of the Bone Yard soon.

Nightmare's End

 

I ain't gonna work on Kelsey's farm no more, no, I ain't gonna work for Kelsey's pa no more.

Kelsey being the daughter of the owner of the trucking company I used to work for. Over the years of my employment she has taken on a larger and larger role at the company, presumably in preparation of taking over when her dad finally retires. It was she who was the architect of the ruse that swindled me out of thousands of dollars.

Today was my last day. I ended up leaving early. I had gone over to say goodby to one of the other drivers. During the course of our conversation I learned that slips had been sent out to sign up for direct deposit, months ago. I never got any slip to sign up for direct deposit. I have been asking for direct deposit for years. Kelsey always says, "We're working on it." Literally, for years; it's that hard to get direct deposit. Now they have it and I wasn't told about it. I went into the dispatch office and asked. They said I should have goten a slip. I said, "Whether real or imagined I feel snubbed," layed down my fuel cards and walked out.

And that's not the last of it. I had six vacation days due me so last week I took five days off, to use them up before my departure. After I left Stone Belt today I took my check to the bank and found that I'd only been paid for two days. I just got off of the phone with Justin, the guy who does payroll and he assures me that I only had those two days coming. Well, isn't that a fine how do you do.

I figured that was the end of it but while I was typing that last paragraph my phone rang. It was Justin. It turnes out that there was a "clerical error" and I will be getting paid for the other three days that I took off. They're afraid of me. No, actually they're afraid of the Department of Labor, but I have no appetite for confrontation. I'll let them dig their own grave.

I have such a work ethic that I was feeling guilty at first, leaving early, but after this last little bit I hope that they really needed me this afternoon. Maybe Kelsey's pa will have to get out and pick up a couple of loads, wouldn't that be rich.

So it's over; not just working for a bad company, but my entire driving career. When I'd tell people that I was moving on I'd wanted to say, "I'm quitting while I'm ahead," but couldn't, because I wasn't done yet. Just like when I used to drive into a stressful area and I'd think, "I've always survived before." Just because I'd done crazy shit and come out unscathed in the past was no guarantee that I was going to do it again. We always survive, until we don't. So until I'd actually hung up my keys I couldn't say that I was ahead. Why, who knows, quitting early today might have actually saved my life. But now it truly is over with and none of the terrible things that could have happened did. I'm done, and I'm ahead.

The nightmare's over.

 

Light at the End of the Tunnel

 

I turned in my notice today. I gave them a week. They only deserve a week. My girlfriend thinks I'm being too generous, that they don't deserve a notice at all. She wishes that I'd wait until the busy season and then just walk out.

She's got a point. They did me wrong. But waiting until the busy season, as quickly as it will actually be here is out of the question. I've already waited enough. The final straw occured back in November. I started looking for another job back then, and was inundated with offers. Drivers are in demand. But I quickly found a position working in a stone mill, not driving at all. I jumped at the chance to get out from behind the wheel. The only problem was that the job wouldn't begin until the spring. One more winter at Stone Belt, one more winter in hell. The worst part was that my employers must have thought that I was all good with their schinanigans, that I wanted to stay. NOT.

Believe me, there are a lot of things wrong with my current job. I've recounted some of the challenges in these pages but what I've described are problems endemic to just being a flatbed truck driver; like having irregular and often long hours, working out in the elements, rain snow or heat wave, and having to deal with traffic. There are many flaws with the company itself, and not all of them trivial; things like bounced pay checks, expensive and poor insurance, inconsistent expectations, and logistical choices that make the job harder, not easier. Oh, I've got a good one, though it is trivial: The yard is across the street from the sewage treatment plant. I don't usually spend a whole lot of time there, but I know it when I do! Welcome home.

There were some good things about the job too, and I've recounted some of those here. Things like driving around Southern Indiana, meeting the people at the quarries and the mills, as well as other places, and keeping active climbing up and down on the trailer, throwing straps and chains and pulling tarps. But the main reason that I stayed with this job was the weekend. I have enjoyed having both Saturday and Sunday completely off. That's rare in a driving job.

And then I discoverd what they'd been doing for the last five years. I took them at their word but something happened that made me investigate and what I found out was that, to make a long story short, they'd been lying to me and cheating me, and everyone in management was aware and complicit. Oh, it's been hard to show up and work for those people these last few months. Afraid that I'd expose them they gave me $4,000 back pay, but that only covers two of the five years. Still, they must think I'm down with it because I really don't know any other way to do my job than well. Then there's the customers who don't deserve a disgruntled employee treating their freight lightly, and of course the safety issue, it's important that the loads I pick up for the other drivers are adequately secured. But I didn't want to start another job somewhere else just to quit in the spring, so I've stuck it out.

It's over now though, if I can just make it through Friday! Light at the end of the tunnel. I'm taking a couple of weeks off and then starting my new job. I'll be starting at the same rate of pay that I now enjoy (not really that great by industry standards for drivers, but I lose nothing), will have a regular schedule working 4 tens and a half day on Friday. Overtime every week and a good start on the weekend. Both Saturday and Sunday off still, I won't have to work out in the elements, and won't have to do crazy stupid stuff like climb around on an uneven load covered with slippery plastic while I try to pull tarps in the wind. The only downside that I can see right now is that it will be boring, a line job, repetative. There are challenges with every job, of course, that's why they call it work.

I'll let you know how it goes.

 

Groundhog Day

 

I was around Switz City on my way to Linton this morning, at about 8:30, when I saw the great Sandhill Crane migration. There were thousands of them! They were in V formations the apex of which was the side of another, that connected to another on and on, cascading across the sky. And their lines were fluid, not straight, but wavering, sometimes breaking up and forming a new V. The best part was how the sun would catch the bright underside of their wings on the upstroke creating a flash of white, setting the whole sky sparkling.

It's not like they filled the sky like they talk about what used to happen in the pre-industrial world. I could see them in the distance and watched as I approached, but I could not see the beginning nor the end of the column. They stretched from horizon to horizon. I should have looked at the odometer while I was under them to see how wide the column was. It was at least a mile, I'm sure. I rolled my window down but was disappointed that I couldn't hear their distinctive trilling over the roar of the wind and my engine.

When I got to my delivery at Bender Lumber in Linton the workers there confirmed that it was the Sandhill Cranes. "They've been around here for about a week," I was told. I don't think they're going to be around there any longer. An hour later, on my way back toward Bloomington they were still passing over, going north. This was a lesser column though, I could see the apex of this group, though I still couldn't see its tail.

It seems a little early for them to be heading north, but then what do I know. Did the groundhog see its shadow today?

 

Eminent Domain

 

As much as I was against the construction of a new terrain highway across Southwestern Indiana I have to admit that after delivering a load in Evansville at 5:00 PM, their time, it sure is nice being able to jump on a super highway and cruise back to the yard. The same was true during our recent trip to Texas. We drove straight through on the return. I shudder to think of those last 100 miles over small highways, tired and stiff. And in the morning on my way to work it's grand to have no stoplights to contend with.

It's a pleasant ride too. Well, in town there's the stress of traffic and merging vehicles (I've got some words on that), but the segment from Bloomington to US 231 is gorgeous. The hills of Southern Indiana clothed in trees and spotted with barns and houses. In one stretch of about five miles there is nothing visible except forest; not a road, not a building of any kind, not even a telephone pole or communication tower. It's beautiful, exhilarating, until you remember that this isn't a picture show, that where you are driving, that very spot was until recently forest too. The two sides were one uninterrupted wild space. Do we even know the consequences of disrupting that contiguity, with so little of our forest land left?

The break is a quarter of a mile wide, bulldozed and steamrolled; take off the hilltops and fill in the valleys. When the road was under construction, the trees removed but the grading not yet started, I couldn't see it. Where IN 45 crossed the barren place the hills to the west were too jumbled. How, I wondered, could a highway be put there? They did it, of course. All that is left of that complex geography is the butt ends of the hills leaning back at a lazy angle from the right of way; one big hump on one side, three smaller ones on the other.

Yup, they had fun with their heavy equipment. I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the point, for them. Harmony Road crosses the highway over a bridge that's a hundred feet high, if it's an inch (actual height: 92 feet). The highway climbs toward it, levels off, declines a little before passing under then begins to climb again. I'm not an engineer, have no idea what exigency may have dictated the shape of the present road, but couldn't they have kept a smooth arc, perhaps at a slightly steeper grade, and built a smaller bridge? Maybe they were just playing around with our tax dollars. One thing's for certain: I don't want to be on that overpass during an earthquake.

Nor is it a smooth ride. In this day in age you'd think they'd know how to make the road surface meet the level of the bridges. Apparently not. There was a jarring bump at each crossing, sometimes so severe that it could cause vehicle damage. Over time they've mitigated this effect either by adding pavement, shaving pavement off or both. These efforts have had varying degrees of success. There's one crossing that I still brace myself for to this day.

Oh, I could go on and on, landslides on the shoulder, collapsed coal mine underneath the road, but I fear that I'm merely bitching again. One last consequence of the highway that I want to mention though; what it has taken from me, personally. It's amazing, really, how much industry there is in the Southern Indiana hills: Quarries, stone mills, saw mills, manufacturing of wood products, the Amish and their enterprising endeavors. I spend a lot of time in some beautiful and remote areas. I'd need to get to them via small Indiana highways, winding through the hills. When I was an over the road driver I hated the small highways, they were so much slower and harder to negotiate while I got paid the same as if I'd breezed in on the freeway. Now I get paid by the hour and it's the interstates that I hate, all that jockeying for position among the big trucks and the four wheelers whipping in and out. On the small highways I get to see the countryside, intimate with the passing year. It was on one such small highway that I had my peak experience. Now, however, I just jump on I 69 for the majority of those trips.

 

Love in the Time of Covid 19

 

Howdy ho you random reader. I'm sure that I have no dedicated following anymore, after my long absences. Blogging used to be my lifeline to sanity, when I was an over the road trucker. I had designed my own webpage back then, as my ISP only offered unstructured space as a home page. It was entitled The Reluctant Trucker. I only became a driver because I needed a job, not for any romantic notion of the open road. When I came in off the road I changed my ISP but didn't like the format of the pre-structured homepage that Comcast offered, so I came over here to blogspot. I was still driving a truck, but instead of moving randomly around the Lower 48 and Canada I reported each day to the same location; my recurring nightmare.

I'm pretty much down with it now, it's not such a nightmare anymore, going into work. There are still aspects of the job that are hellish, to be sure, but overall it's not bad, even sometimes enjoyable. I've got to keep my guard up though, it is precisely when a driver gets comfortable behind the wheel that he is most at risk. We all know that the nightmare could return in less than a second.

So, I find myself with some time on my hands, what with Indiana's stay at home order. I've often contemplated checking in here, but the times I do have grown farther and farther apart, and yet the site remains; so here I am. What, working from home? Not possible, I'm a truck driver, remember? In fact transportation is considered essential and my company is still operating. With Indiana's lax restrictions most businesses other than restaurants are still open too, business as usual. After all, they are each essential unto themselves, right? There's plenty of work for me to do.

No, my isolation is voluntary. I was wondering what the stay at home order was going to mean for my job when I was handed a sheet of paper declaring that I was part of the "Essential Team" of Stone Belt Freight Lines; a development I met with mixed emotions. On the one hand I can little afford to be out of work, on the other I doubt that public health officials are trashing the world economy for nothing, shouldn't we all be doing our part? Still conflicted the day before the stay at home order was to start I was sitting in a line of trucks waiting to be loaded. I had my window down playing solitaire when a guy jumps up onto the step of my truck. He didn't actually put his head through the window, thank goodness, but was well within the six feet of social distancing. He said, "Sorry it's taking so long but we've got four loaders out sick."

Great, so what the f**k are you breathing on me for? I was pissed. I called my boss and told him what had just happened and went on record that I thought what we were doing, continuing to operate as if nothing was out of the ordinary, was wrong. He said that if I didn't want to do it I didn't have to, I could just leave, hang up my keys and let them know when I was ready to come back to work. Taken aback I told him I'd complete this load, delivering to Indianapolis in the morning, and then let him know my decision. I knew I could just quit, I didn't expect to be given a choice in the matter. Could I afford not to take work that was available? Not easily. Was it the right thing to do. Almost certainly, with the only caveat that if too few of us sacrificed would it make a difference? A lame excuse at best.

I probably would have made the same decision in the end, even without this incident. Despite the fact that I rarely get sick and haven't, knock on wood, had the flu in over twenty years the risk remains to be an unwitting carrier with no sign of the illness. And, being a driver the potential is there to not only spread the disease within a community, but to transport it between communities. If what I were doing was essential I'd be all in. I'd be the man for the job. Like I say I don't usually get sick. The work ethic at my company is that when you're sick you work through it. I've been in a room full of sick people without the protection of a flu shot and came out unscathed. On the other hand if I did contract the disease I'm pretty healthy, I'd most likely survive it. But I don't feel that what I do is really essential. I can't in good conscience take the risk to others more vulnerable and the public health system's capacity.

So here I am with a little time on my hands. There's plenty to do around the house, to be sure, but I've been wanting to check in here. I promise that before this is over I'll come back with some more updates on my life and work.

 

Preemptive Retraction

 

Oh, I get a kick out of my post titles sometimes. I wrote a post recently titled Insult to Injury. It was an appropriate title since the post dealt with the Department of Transportation's lack of concern for the motoring public, strangling traffic with closed lanes yet no work being done for weeks at a time. When I reviewed it before publishing I realized that I was merely complaining. I was reminded of the rule that I had back in the day, when I used to write all the time: I could complain, but only if the gripe was presented as somehow interesting or amusing. This was just a bitch fest.

So how is the I 69 construction shaping up? A year later and they're still not finished. INDOT swears they'll be finished soon. They said that the joke around the office is that it'll be done by August 32nd. I'm sorry, but at two years behind schedule I don't find that amusing.