Neanderpundit

If you’ve ever done any work to your car, odds are good you’ve done some lot work. You know what I mean- changing a set of windshield wipers in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. Swapping out a battery at K mart. Maybe even, in a moment of weakness, putting in a new radio head unit in the parking lot of Radio Shaft, because the AM radio that came in your Vega had finally become insufferable.

Today, I saw the ultimate Lotwork. In the parking lot of the AutoZone, six guys, doing an engine swap. Every so often they’d run in to buy another tube of sealant, or a gasket that didn’t come in the kit, or some such wierdness. Guy at the Zone said they’d been there all afternoon. By the time I got a new battery for the Honda, I heard them firing it up.

THAT is lot work. Damn.

In the steel mill, you got dirty. Not merely dirty, as a mechanic might get, not merely filthy; sometimes you’d get so filthy that you’d have to start with solvents and move on to abrasives and eventually end up at Lava and then plain soap.
Because there are two shower rooms each of which has about fifteen showerheads, and over two hundred guys on each shift showering, you get your shit done and get out quick.

Every week you got issued five uniforms, (green flame retardant flame suits) ten pairs of gloves, seven towels. The towels were too small to go around you. They were purple so people wouldn’t steal them. They were damned ugly, too.

Every day, at the end of your shift, you would wash your hands, sometimes using solvent, if you had to, because washing your hands in the shower would take forever. So you got most of the crap off. Then you’d walk back to your locker, strip down, walk to the shower, and wait for a head to open so you could clean up.

So it was for years. I worked the mill for the five years of my apprenticeship, and for the first three ande change, I wore glasses.

I would go to the shower at the end of the day, and take off my glasses, strip down and shower.

Then I got contacts. I mostly wore them at home, but one day I went to work with them on. You werent’ supposed to wear them at work, but I did, that one day at least.

At the end of the day, I went to the locker room, stripped down, and wandered into the shower.

Jesus Christ on a crutch.

Now I have seen some ugly shit, in my life. I’ve seen things that would make a goat vomit. But I’d never seen a thing in my life, to compare with the horror of a hundred plus naked, filthy men, carrying ugly purple towels, from 18 to 62 years old, soaping themselves up in the nasty shower rooms at Inland. I walked back to my locker and took out my contacts. I was sick to my stomach.

Don’t believe what the Lasik folks tell you. There’s times when it’s a damned good thing to have fuzzy eyesight.

Still pretty scary, and it takes me a bit to get up the nerve, even just driving around the hood.

Every time I ride, it’s another little oil leak to fix, another adjustment to make, and little by little i’m getting this 25 year old bike back to running snuff. Learning as much about motorcycling and motorcycles as I am about riding.