As long as I am still in contact with the earth, I don’t mind airplane rides.  Because of various forms of necessity, I have had to learn to use airplanes as an optional means of transportation.

When I was a youngster if we heard an airplane overhead, everyone ran outside to look at it.  It was a rare occurrence.

The first electrician I worked for loved to fly.  He said he never felt good until he was up in the air.  Many mornings before he went to work he took his brother’s plane and flew around a bit.  One morning he offered to take me for a ride.  It was my first experience up in the air.

(To me it is a feeling similar to climbing a pole or ladder or being in a lift.  I am apprehensive all the while I’m up there.  But I swallow my fear and get the work done.  It is such a relief when I get back down on the ground.)

I asked my pilot boss what it feels like when there is rough weather.  (If you have a tendency towards air sickness this is a question best asked while on the ground.)  He said; “Like this.”  He then proceeded to make up and down waves, with the plane, in the air, while flying,  that resembled sine waves.

(For the sake of description, a sine wave depiction is used when drawing a representation of sound waves.  Now visualize the plane you are in performing a maneuver that looks like that.)

About the second time he finished his second “wave” I told him; “That’s enough!  I get it!  You can stop now!”

The next time I was airborne, I was working for a contractor with jobs all over eastern Montana.  Each of us electricians had a pick-up with radio communication.  One day I got a call saying there was a problem where I was needed about 40 miles away.  I was told to pull off onto an approach, grab my tools and I would be picked up by the company pilot.

The pilot landed on the gravel road and taxied over to my pick-up.  I got in and he took off.  This guy was an excellent pilot.  He had flown a fighter plane in W.W. II.  I think he could have landed on a rock pile.  I was completely relaxed while he was flying.  He was like an expert driver driving a wheeled vehicle down a well maintained road.

When we got to the job he landed in a cow pasture.  Our foreman came while I was working on the job so the pilot took off.  The foreman would get me back to my pick-up.

As the pilot left the pasture I watched him go.  He had to get enough lift to clear a fence at the end of the pasture.  As he flew away I called him on the radio.  I told him; “You had lots of room.  You cleared that fence by at least a foot.”

That was not my last airplane ride.

One time when I was working with another fellow, he received a visit from one of his friends while we were on the job.  This friend told him he was leaving town.  After he left the job, my partner told me what was happening.

His friend had checked his bank account and he had way too much money in it.  He drew it all out in cash and was leaving town before the bank caught the mistake.

I asked my partner if he was sure the money hadn’t come out of his own account.  For the rest of the day he looked a little worried.  He must have gone right to the bank after work to check.  The next morning he told me he had checked his bank account and he was O.K.

My wife and I had a similar thing happen, but it had a different ending.

We would get paid on Friday.  The banks were closed on Saturday and Sunday.  The bank had arranged for us to have prepared deposit slips and envelopes so that we could take the Friday paycheck, endorse it, place it in an envelope with the deposit slip, and deposit it in a night depository.  Then we could write checks on the money all weekend as we needed to.  At the time, small town banks were very cooperative in matters like this.

One day we received a bank statement with way too much money in our account.  It wasn’t a round number difference either.  We couldn’t imagine who would deposit money into our account.  My wife, Becky, went down to the bank to see what was going on.

While the bank people were tracking it down, a Native American woman was pacing the floor and loudly declaiming about cheaters and crooks.  She had deposited her husband’s paycheck in the night depository and never received credit for it.

Apparently the bank had given her deposit slips and envelopes with our name and account number on it.  She had not noticed the wrong name and account number.

The bank managed to straighten it out.  I do think we saved a couple of bank employees from getting a very bad hair cut that day.

Working men generally tend to get along by using friendly razzing.  I remember one shop where we had a good variety of ethnic groups.  On boy was of Japanese descent.  Another boy was Italian.  Another one was French and one boy was Irish.  One guy had an easy name to read, “Brown.”  However I think he was just a run of the mill Caucasian with nothing strikingly different about his ethnicity.  Myself, I am Swiss/German, but I was mostly razzed about my farm boy background.

One day the Irish guy made a joke about Italians that would be considered politically incorrect today.  Everyone laughed, including the Italian guy.

The Japanese guy was more or less the foreman.  One time he had written out instructions for a job and sent the Irishman to do it.  The Irishman came back that night and told the foreman he couldn’t read his handwriting.  The Japanese boy took the slip and said; “Well it says…”

He hesitated, walked over to where the light was better and said; “It says….”  He paused and handed the slip back to the Irishman.  He said;”What’s the matter?  Can’t you read Japanese?”

In that shop the Boss had a good sense of humor also.  I remember when he was standing on the top of a five foot ladder trying to reach some light fixtures on a shelf.  His wife, who worked in the office, came back to the warehouse and saw him standing on the top step of the ladder.  Knowing it wasn’t a good idea, she asked if he wanted her to get him a different ladder.  He looked down at the ladder and said; “No thank you.  This one is almost too short as it is.”

I used to get a lot of razzing about being so skinny.  One time a bunch of us were outside eating our lunch on a hot sunny day.  It never took us a full ½ hour to eat our lunch so there were usually a few minutes to relax.

I would usually lay in the shade of a telephone pole.  The trouble with that was that as the sun moved so did the shade.  There was a few times my rolling around trying to stay in the shade of a telephone pole prompted reminders about how skinny I was.

At a different employer we would hire some summer help.  One was a young boy who was in High School in the fall, winter and spring.  Another was a High School shop teacher.  By coincidence they knew each other from school and the two would razz each other constantly over the summer.

One time the Shop Teacher was on a ladder working on something above his head.  The student, looking for a ladder he could use, came over to him and asked: “How long are you going to need that ladder?”

The shop teacher very deliberately looked down at the ladder and counted the rungs; “One, … Two, … Three” out loud.  Then he looked at the student and said; “About 3 feet.”