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Keyser Söze

On 10/27/15 4:48 PM, wrote:
On Tue, 27 Oct 2015 12:05:39 -0700 (PDT), True North
wrote:

One of my tougher jobs was struggling with 400 pound cubes of rubber....trying to drag them out from under the wings of a cargo ships hold and hook up to the winch for offloading. A number of the full time longshoreman disappeared....leaving a few of the reliable guys and a handful of us hired from the bullpen to do the work.

For just good old hard work, moving a computer system in the olden
days was right up there. You had a room full of "boxes" (computer
frames), the size of a commercial sub zero refrigerator, weighing up
to half a ton or so, connected with a buttload of cables about an inch
in diameter and up to 100 feet long. All of this had to be
disconnected and moved around all the while you were throwing 30 pound
floor tiles. Most of the time, the protective rings around the floor
tile cuts were gone and the saw cuts were razor sharp. Just another
little hazard to deal with.
... and they wanted it all to happen on a shift, maybe two.

It was a white collar job tho, since we were still wearing suits.

The biggest system frames were called "Elemax" (size), the largest
thing you can get in a standard office building elevator with the trim
off of the interior of the elevator and the covers off the machine.
It still got ugly some time when the weight would screw up where the
car stopped and it wouldn't roll off.
A "Johnson Bar" was a handy tool to have.

My dad had double decker steel dollies/display racks on wheels he built
for boats up to 20' long that enabled him to better use his floor space.
The boats on the top rack could be tilted so their insides could be
seen. Every two weeks, he liked to move everything around, and this
usually was done on a weekday when there were fewer customers around. So
the crew of three or four guys and one kid (if I happened to be around
after school) would move these mini barges up and down on the racks and
around the floors of the three showrooms. I always thought it amazing
that none of us got killed during these adventures. He had a crane
mounted on a Model A Ford truck outside to lift the boats off the
manufacturer's delivery trucks but towards the end of his life, the
boats were getting too large and bulky for his truck. Oh, and the new
outboards in their crate boxes, up to about 100 hp in those days, were
stacked two and three high along the side of the main showroom, and had
to be grunted up or down. My real job when I showed up, though, was to
clean out and wax and polish the beautiful wood decks and seats on many
of these boats. Wax on, wax off.

That, and drive the jeep up to
Nick's Italian Grocery and Bookie Emporium to buy lunch on Saturday for
the crew. I might have been 14 when I started driving just slightly
illegally on the streets, but hell, I'd already been driving on the boat
yard property for three years. Heady days.