Once upon a time a few decades ago I was the guy who got stuck with the new kid at work. Each summer our local school system would pick three kids to work a summer job in the public works department. In street maintenace we'd get a boy and a girl. It was the 1980's so pc was not in full swing. The boy would work outdoors and the girl would get secretarial duties. Being a crew leader meant I got tasked with the boy each summer. Being under 18 they weren't allowed to run motorized lawn equipment. To me that was stupid because by twelve in my community you cut your parents grass. Things were changing though. Every kid gets a trophy was a new way of thinking. My first summer the kid was a future idiot. He was lazy and dumb as a door knob. I complained to the boss after a while so they cut him loose before he hurt himself or someone else. His final straw was the day he fell in love with the summer helper girl in the office and was serinading her over the two way police radio we communicated with before pagers and celphones. When the police chief complained to the city manager my boss had no recourse but to let him go. No telling what happened to that guy.
The next summer I had another kid who was also dumb as a door knob, but he was willing to learn and did not mind working. By the end of the summer he had developed muscles and was a skilled worker. He came back the next summer but… he had discovered girls and partying. So I had fun with that one. When he came in hung over I'd find work that needed a jack hammer and we'd bust up a sidewalk that needed replacing. We mixed concrete in a drum and moved it with a wheel burrow. He could easily move a fully loaded with soupy concrete one into place before long. He bought a nice car and ended up getting married young, buying a house and became a professional fire fighter.
At my job later I was an inspector and I'd get an up and coming, destined for college youngster each summer. Some were great and I developed a philosophy that I was training my future boss with each one. I left the government job and began work as a consultant. It's an engineering company with inspectors. Some call us field engineers. So it is a natural thing to train young engineers in the summer months while they are still going to college the rest of the year. I've seen many go on to become leaders in the industry I work in. The leaders who spent time in the field for months at a time end up being way better bosses than the ones who never tested concrete in 99 degree weather for 12 hours or had to stand out in 15 degree weather counting steel bars in a bridge deck before covering them with concrete.
On the bad side of the spectrum, this one guy had to put in two weeks in the field as an engineer in training. He thought that meant reading plans in an air conditioned office all day. They put him outside in the heat one day on a day a worker got hurt on a bridge project. OSHA was called to the scene. When the OSHA man asked the up and comer what happened he became billigerant with the OSHA official. Not a good idea. When the OSHA person flexed his muscles through OSHA rules the up and comer called the police on him for harrassment. How dare that government worker impose a penalty on him. That up and comer went on to be a leader in our state transportation department and is personally responsible for a whole bunch of chaotic rules being imposed on contracters who have powerful lobbyists in state government. Rules that cost the tax payers extra money in claims by the big contractors who sue the state, or end up putting small contractors out of business. But that one guy who received a trophy for showing up his whole life has no idea how life outside his little bubble actually works.
Not long ago I saw in a trade magazine a young engineer I was tasked with my first year as a consultant had won a prestigious award for thinking outside the box on a waste water treatment facility that was over burdened in a large city. When I was working with that kid he was working three jobs one summer to earn enough to pay his next semester at school and still have some beer drinking money. He drove a junky little Toyota everywhere and was a pleasure to be around. The type of person who at times just stared into space because he was day dreaming some theory of how to turn turd water into something useful. My project was a "metric job" where everything was based on the metric system. Concrete was measured in cubic meters or finished items in meter lengths. Areas were hectaires instead of acres and temperatures were celcious. The client had conversion factors that were one decimal place. A millimeter was say 25.4 per inch. But often times when computers got involved things did not properly convert. Tons was one such number.
The project involved thousands of tons of gravel. At a rock quarry nowadays they just push a button and conversions take place. So a gravel ticket will have printed on it a standard ton number and a metric ton number. Back then the paperwork would state standard numbers and we had to convert them to metric. Using the clients 1 decimal place conversion factor would not match what the contractors computer said it should be. So at the end of a day when the standard number of gravel tons was say 16890.23 our conversion of 0.9 would give a figure of 15280.21 tons for example but…… the contractors computer would say 16408.14 metric tons. That meant a difference of 1127.93 tons. And at $15 a ton the contractor was being ripped off some $16918.95 for that one day. That was a half a years salary for some back then. One day the boss said "you, new guy (talking to me), figure out the conversion numbers their computer is using and get the smart kid to help you". About a week later the two of us had figured out instead of 0.9 it should be 0.97145 for that one and several like it.
We gave the list of correct conversion numbers to the boss who kicked it up the ladder as it were and some other twirp got the credit once our numbers became the official okee-dokee governmental conversion factors. As it turns out that kid (who is now in his late thirtys) saved a city millions of dollars in fines by the EPA for implimenting a method of waste water treatment he had invented in college but nobody ever thought would work. I reached out to him via email to say hello and congratulate him on his acheivement. He said he concocted the idea one early moring at the Outter Banks of North Carolina while being held upside down by some drinking buddies with the tap from a keg turned on that summer he worked with me.
The next summer I had another kid who was also dumb as a door knob, but he was willing to learn and did not mind working. By the end of the summer he had developed muscles and was a skilled worker. He came back the next summer but… he had discovered girls and partying. So I had fun with that one. When he came in hung over I'd find work that needed a jack hammer and we'd bust up a sidewalk that needed replacing. We mixed concrete in a drum and moved it with a wheel burrow. He could easily move a fully loaded with soupy concrete one into place before long. He bought a nice car and ended up getting married young, buying a house and became a professional fire fighter.
At my job later I was an inspector and I'd get an up and coming, destined for college youngster each summer. Some were great and I developed a philosophy that I was training my future boss with each one. I left the government job and began work as a consultant. It's an engineering company with inspectors. Some call us field engineers. So it is a natural thing to train young engineers in the summer months while they are still going to college the rest of the year. I've seen many go on to become leaders in the industry I work in. The leaders who spent time in the field for months at a time end up being way better bosses than the ones who never tested concrete in 99 degree weather for 12 hours or had to stand out in 15 degree weather counting steel bars in a bridge deck before covering them with concrete.
On the bad side of the spectrum, this one guy had to put in two weeks in the field as an engineer in training. He thought that meant reading plans in an air conditioned office all day. They put him outside in the heat one day on a day a worker got hurt on a bridge project. OSHA was called to the scene. When the OSHA man asked the up and comer what happened he became billigerant with the OSHA official. Not a good idea. When the OSHA person flexed his muscles through OSHA rules the up and comer called the police on him for harrassment. How dare that government worker impose a penalty on him. That up and comer went on to be a leader in our state transportation department and is personally responsible for a whole bunch of chaotic rules being imposed on contracters who have powerful lobbyists in state government. Rules that cost the tax payers extra money in claims by the big contractors who sue the state, or end up putting small contractors out of business. But that one guy who received a trophy for showing up his whole life has no idea how life outside his little bubble actually works.
Not long ago I saw in a trade magazine a young engineer I was tasked with my first year as a consultant had won a prestigious award for thinking outside the box on a waste water treatment facility that was over burdened in a large city. When I was working with that kid he was working three jobs one summer to earn enough to pay his next semester at school and still have some beer drinking money. He drove a junky little Toyota everywhere and was a pleasure to be around. The type of person who at times just stared into space because he was day dreaming some theory of how to turn turd water into something useful. My project was a "metric job" where everything was based on the metric system. Concrete was measured in cubic meters or finished items in meter lengths. Areas were hectaires instead of acres and temperatures were celcious. The client had conversion factors that were one decimal place. A millimeter was say 25.4 per inch. But often times when computers got involved things did not properly convert. Tons was one such number.
The project involved thousands of tons of gravel. At a rock quarry nowadays they just push a button and conversions take place. So a gravel ticket will have printed on it a standard ton number and a metric ton number. Back then the paperwork would state standard numbers and we had to convert them to metric. Using the clients 1 decimal place conversion factor would not match what the contractors computer said it should be. So at the end of a day when the standard number of gravel tons was say 16890.23 our conversion of 0.9 would give a figure of 15280.21 tons for example but…… the contractors computer would say 16408.14 metric tons. That meant a difference of 1127.93 tons. And at $15 a ton the contractor was being ripped off some $16918.95 for that one day. That was a half a years salary for some back then. One day the boss said "you, new guy (talking to me), figure out the conversion numbers their computer is using and get the smart kid to help you". About a week later the two of us had figured out instead of 0.9 it should be 0.97145 for that one and several like it.
We gave the list of correct conversion numbers to the boss who kicked it up the ladder as it were and some other twirp got the credit once our numbers became the official okee-dokee governmental conversion factors. As it turns out that kid (who is now in his late thirtys) saved a city millions of dollars in fines by the EPA for implimenting a method of waste water treatment he had invented in college but nobody ever thought would work. I reached out to him via email to say hello and congratulate him on his acheivement. He said he concocted the idea one early moring at the Outter Banks of North Carolina while being held upside down by some drinking buddies with the tap from a keg turned on that summer he worked with me.
Last edited:
