Rick Ranson

‘Hotter than doughnut grease!”
“They’d drink their own bathwater.”
“Where did you learn to whisper? In a sawmill?”
“Here kid. Here’s a plastic bag, go play spaceman.”
“You move so slow we’re going to have to tape a flag on you to see if you move or not.”
“You couldn’t organize a three man race to a four man outhouse.”
And finally…
“You’ll never see a Brink’s Truck following a Hearse.”

“In Fairfax Virginia there’s a ‘trash boiler’. Obviously powered by all the trash in the neighborhood. Every once in a while the FBI brings all the confiscated drugs and drug related equipment to burn it.

The FBI comes in a long convoy of big black SUV’s and all the employees of the trash boiler have to go immediately into the lunchroom. Attendance is taken and double checked. Until all the drugs are burnt nobody leaves that room. Nobody.

Once one of the local zoos had a hippo that had died of old age so they wanted to dispose of it’s carcass  in the Fairfax boiler. The hippo’s body was so big that it got stuck in the loading hopper. So some poor Boilermaker had to climb inside that loading hopper, stand on what’s left of the hippo, and with a chainsaw cut pieces off that hippo’s body so it would slide into the boiler.”

Big Red* was a monster. A 350 pound lazy, fat, useless, monster. It’s a funny thing that when you are working on boilers the contractor expects you to climb through the manway to actually go inside that boiler. But Big Red thought that his size would give him a pass.

He didn’t take into consideration that Boilermakers have literally no sympathy for shirkers. No sympathy at all, none, zippo, nada. Nooo mama.  Boilermakers are some of the hardest workers I have ever worked with. I’ve always said that Boilermakers don’t just work on a job they ‘attack it.’

Except for Red.

After second coffee with no Red inside the boiler the entire crew stood outside the boiler and waited for Red to show. When he finally lumbered up the stairs every man on the crew pointed to the manway.

There’s a way to get into a manway that sort of looks like you are swimming a side-stroke. That is, if you are a normal size. If you are a fat slob Jabba the Hut with a body like a mudslide, to get into a boiler you have to do the ‘Walrus.’

Red Walrus’d into the manway. Except half way into the passageway his pants got caught. He ended up inside the boiler with his pants around his ankles.   Red decided to walrus back out, except half way back his shirt got caught and it ended up around his neck.

Red then walked towards the cool-down tent and fainted. Slowly.  As he lay on that dirty concrete floor PeePee** walked over and outlined Red’s body in chalk.

*Not his real name.
**His real nickname.

And you wonder why I wrote these Boilermaker stories down.

“My aunt had a spider monkey. Spider monkeys are dirty little bastards. They shit everywhere, get into everything and bite? Man do they bite.

“So my family is having Thanksgiving dinner, and that stupid bitch of an aunt shows up with that little prick. So right there in the middle of the party my other aunt shows up with her Pomeranian.

“It’s Thanksgiving dinner, for f..@#$’s sake. And those idiots show up with their pets, on purpose.

“The Pomeranian takes one look at the monkey and takes after it. He starts chasing the monkey all over the house. Lamps were knocked over, people are screaming, the monkey bit my cousin who tried to grab it. Finally the monkey goes right through the screen on the screen door with that dog after it.

“The dog starts chasing the monkey all over the yard. People are running around trying to catch the dog, and the monkey. My two aunts are screaming at each other.  The neighbors are all coming out. Shit what a mess.

“Finally the monkey goes up the hydro pole. He gets to the top of the hydro pole and reaches across from one wire to another.

“There was this huge ‘BANG!’ and a puff of smoke like a mini-mushroom cloud.

“All that was left of the monkey was a tail wrapped around the hydro wire with its stub-end swinging back and forth … smoking.

The stories from Boilermakers just keep on coming.

“It was pretty slow with the Boilermakers that summer so I was working as a Sheet Metal worker maintaining swimming pools in Thunder Bay. One day I had a blocked tube , so I blew into it. I blew and blew but nothing. So I sucked it.

The tube was full of swimming pool chlorine.

Luckily I didn’t swallow any of it. My mouth blistered all up right away. I hacked and hacked and hacked. For hours.

But BOY! Were my teeth ever white!”