This short story is number five in my series of “Jobs-Less-Fun-Than-Writing”:
The summer before I went to college I worked in a metal-finishing plant, the most disgusting, dangerous and unhygienic factory in existence. I stood all day beside a boiling vat of acid, ten feet wide and taller than me. Beside the vat it was over 50º C. The acid vat was the first in a series of vats, containing various chemicals and unidentified liquids. I hooked metal frames, car parts, and other steel objects onto a rack attached to chains and an electronic pulley system. When the rack was full, another worker used a handheld device to raise the rack and lower it into the acid. Then raise it and lower it into the next vat of chemicals, and the next, and so on, until it was set aside to dry. This process coated the metal in protective zinc. The air above the vats and throughout the factory was just a big slush pile of noxious fumes.
In other parts of the factory, a similar process was used to cover nuts and bolts with zinc, but the vats were smaller and only waist height. The guys working beside these vats would often unzip and piss into the vats instead of walking to the washroom.
My doctor later told me that some of the chemicals in the factory must have entered my body through mosquito bites on my arm. Seven, to be exact. That summer I grew seven boils the length of my right arm, each larger than a golf ball. They were red and angry and I screamed each time they were lightly touched. Over the course of a week they all exploded, and what sprayed and oozed out of them was not for the weak of stomach.
Fortunately, the boils cleared up before my first day of college. But on that first day, I noticed a small pimple on the inside of my right elbow. During my freshman orientation week, that pimple grew to a prodigious boil, shaming the puny efforts of its seven dead cousins. It was so large it was flat on the top, like a plateau. For seven days I visited the Emergency Room of the college hospital and saw a different doctor each day. The only one to help me was the seventh, who said, “Well, we’ll have to drain that thing. But we can’t give you a needle to stop the pain, because of the infection. Nurse, please get me some of that spray-on freezing stuff.” The doctor probably used a more technical term for the spray-on freezing stuff, but I forget it now.
The nurse returned in a moment. “Sorry doctor, but we have run out of the spray.”
“OK,” he said. “We’ll just do without it. Bill, this may hurt a bit.”
The doctor secured my arm to the bed frame with leather straps. “Look away, Bill,” he said. I looked anyway. He took a scalpel and sliced a cross in the centre of my boil’s plateau, that same boil which was excruciatingly painful to gently touch. Then he forced a rubber tube into the hole, like a magician stuffing a large handkerchief into his closed fist. As the doctor squeezed my arm, puss drained from the hose and filled a beaker, about the size of a pint of beer. Simply stated, this entire procedure really, really hurt. I still have that scar on the inside of my elbow, after nearly 40 years.
A couple of years later, my mother mailed me a clipping from my hometown newspaper. The picture featured four people wearing white Haz-Mat suits, the kind with hoods and little rectangles of glass to look through. They were cleaning up the metal-finishing plant, recently closed for over 200 health violations. The plant also caused an environmental disaster by leaking chemicals into the water table. The article stated that the clean up crew was only allowed to work for three hours per day because of the extreme toxicity of the site. And they were wearing Haz-Mat suits! They were probably making more than the $6.50 per hour I made that summer. I often wonder what chemicals are still swirling inside my body, and every time I get a little pimple I start to worry……
What dangerous job have you had? Tell me.