Welcome to Labor Day Weekend, the last full cup of summer. In honor of the holiday I am going to be mostly offline this weekend. Before I log off, though, I wanted to leave you with this little memory of what Labor Day personally means to me.
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Way back before the dawn of recorded time, my home town had a jobs
program for disadvantaged youth that provided minimum-wage entry-level
summer jobs in the city’s parks department. Despite our city's rather
alarming poverty stats they could never find enough
disadvantaged youths willing to fill all the budgeted positions, though, and so every
June a second frantic call went out, for any high-school-aged kids willing to work in their local neighborhood park. This is how I wound
up in the program.
It was, I will admit, a pleasantly stupid way
to earn a few bucks over the summer. This was way back in time, before the advent of the
ubiquitous “Would you like fries with that?” job, as well as (thankfully) before the invention of gas-powered weed-whackers or leaf blowers. So my crew worked
outdoors most days, from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., schlepping hoses, watering
lawns, picking up litter, moving picnic tables around, and otherwise
performing similarly arduous and intellectually demanding tasks.
One morning when we clocked in, though, our foreman told us we had a new
challenge. The park had a bandshell, and our job was to assemble the
temporary stage risers needed for the concert that night. He drove over
to the bandshell—and I do mean drove, while we trotted along
behind; I don't think I ever saw him get his fat carcass out of that golf cart
or without a cigarette in his mouth all summer long—pointed to the backstage door,
and told us the riser parts were inside and being a bunch of smart kids,
we should be able to figure out how to put it together. Someone asked
how long the job would take.
He said, “The union work rules say it takes a full crew four hours to assemble those risers.” Then he putt-putted off.
Four
hours? Of course we took that as a challenge! We dove into it,
found the rudimentary instructions, figured out how to assemble the thing—it was no mystery to anyone
who’d ever played with Tinkertoys or an Erector Set—whipped it
together in under an hour, and were just smug as could be when our
foreman came back to check on our progress.
He took one look at
it and said, “You did it wrong. Tear it down and do it over.” Somebody
protested that there was no possible way we could have put it together
wrong, but he repeated, “The union work rules say it takes a full crew
four hours to assemble those risers. You obviously did it wrong. Now
tear it down and do it over.” Then he putted off again.
Okay,
maybe, just maybe, we might have missed something. So we disassembled
the risers, and then, working carefully and double-checking our work every step
of the way, we reassembled them again in about two hours.
When
our foreman came back at lunch time to check up on us, he was furious. “You dumb @#&$^#s! Didn’t you @#($*&ing LISTEN? You did it
wrong AGAIN!” Somebody tried to explain to him that we were sure we’d
done it right this ti—
“Listen to me! The union work rules say
it takes a full crew FOUR hours to assemble those risers! Now you will
@*&^ing well TAKE four @#*&ing hours to put those @#*&ing
things together or I will @#@(#$*&ing @#(*& your @#^&*$
@#(*&es!"
Oh. Well, when you explain it that way…
We ate our lunches. Someone
had a Frisbee. We threw that around for a while. Those that smoked,
did. Me, I found a trashy pulp novel somebody had left on top of
an electrical box backstage and read most of it. Along about 2:30 or
so, some overachiever decided it was time to get going on the risers
again, and we did—very slowly—such that we were just finishing it up
when our foreman came back to check on us at about five minutes before
quitting time.
This time when he looked at it, he was smiling. “Good job. I hope you boys learned something today.”
As a matter of fact, I believe I did.
—Bruce Bethke
3 comments:
What was the trashy pulp novel about?
I think the book was Ten Years to Doomsday, by Chester Anderson and Michael Kurland. The cover art seems very familiar. A bunch of Medieval warriors in helmets and chain mail, armed with pikes and swords, squaring off to fight against who- or whatever is about to emerge from that huge silver Hugo Award-like spaceship that's obviously just landed --
Except for one guy who is in the foreground to us but behind all the rest of the Medieval warriors, so they don't see him, who has sheathed his sword, whipped out his BFG 9000, and is drawing a bead on the alien spaceship.
The story seems really familiar. I know it wasn't The High Crusade, because I would have remembered that one. But the plot was the basic "people from Earth infiltrate Medieval-style society to jump-start their technological evolution so that they can fight the oncoming alien horde that is threatening the entire galaxy."
If you can find a copy, you may find Ten Years to Doomsday to be worth a look. There's no characterization to speak of, it's just plot, plot, plot, plot racing along at breakneck speed, but the idea is pretty clever. An alien horde is coming. If they're not stopped or slowed they'll reach Earth in about ten years. The Terran Federation figures they need about 15 years to be ready, so they send a covert team to this planet that's between Earth and the horde to get the primitive natives ready to fight a space war. The natives aren't expected to win, or even survive, they're just expected to slow the alien horde down enough to buy the Terran Federation the extra time it needs to be ready for the oncoming war.
Unfortunately, the primitive natives prove to be a little too intelligent and adaptable, and the covert team does its job a little too well. In the end, Earth's meddling produces a space-faring war-ready culture that not only defeats the alien horde, it's now ready to launch a full-on Crusade to bring their one true religion to the ignorant heathens in the Terran Federation.
Kinda makes me wonder if the authors of this book worked for the US State Department, or maybe the CIA.
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