{"id":4748,"date":"2011-11-04T16:30:17","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T21:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/?p=4748"},"modified":"2011-11-04T16:30:17","modified_gmt":"2011-11-04T21:30:17","slug":"when-i-was-just-a-lad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/?p=4748","title":{"rendered":"When I was just a lad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, when i first started working at Inland Steel, all those years ago, I noticed something peculiar about the way the boys celebrated their birthdays. <\/p>\n

They would usually catch a guy in the shower, and beat him with a piece of radiator hose for the number of years he is old. <\/p>\n

About once a week, this would happen, there were nearly two hundred guys in the shop and rarely a week went by when someone hadn’t a birthday to celebrate. About once a month, someone would go to the hospital, bleeding from the back or legs, often as not a bruised testicle, sometimes a torn scrotum. These were the guys friends. Whoever was the victim of this celebration would gleefully reciprocate when it was his turn. I witnessed this in my first couple weeks of employment, so my birthday became a closely guarded secret. I never participated in this foolishness, and I never desired to.<\/p>\n

One day I couldn’t conceal was my hire date; they were less nasty about that, but the only time I ever got caught on my service anniversary was in my second year of employment there; three big guys caught me in the shower while a fourth with a paintbrush coated my wedding tackle liberally with Cop graf,<\/a> an anti seize compound that was a mixture of grease, graphite, and copper. The gooey, slimy stuff was the consistency of toothpaste and had a high concentration of finely divided copper bits; they called it “The Bronze pecker” and it took forever to get off; literally months later I’d be in the shower and see a tiny fleck of copper where no tiny fleck of copper should be.<\/p>\n

At least I didn’t get beat too.<\/p>\n

I’m still a bit standoffish about telling people my birthday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, when i first started working at Inland Steel, all those years ago, I noticed something peculiar about the way the boys celebrated their birthdays. They would usually catch a guy in the shower, and beat him with a piece of radiator hose for the number of years he is old. About once a week, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}