I mentioned before that for awhile I worked on the missile silo program.  While I was doing so in Montana, I was camped in a little town near Great Falls.  I had a homemade camper on the back of my flatbed pick-up.

For work, the company had given me a company pick-up to use.  Near where I was camped there was a hotel where the guy I was working with was staying.  He was an older man who hailed from Minnesota.  He was a source of many stories of wild experiences.

One day when I was doing the driving we travelled to a site Southeast of Great Falls somewhere.  (That’s as close to an exact location as I can give; not for security reasons, but because it was a lot of years ago.)

We worked hard all day and when we left to go home it was already dark.  We were headed back to the little town where we were staying.  I drove a couple of miles back to a crossroads and turned left.  My partner said to me; “Aren’t you going the wrong way?”

Confidently I replied; “No.  We will just go the next crossroads and make a right.  It will take us directly to where I’m camped.”

We drove silently for awhile.  We came over a rise and there were the lights of Great Falls.  “Oh shucks.  Those lights are Great Falls, I’m going the wrong way!”  (Even then Great Falls was significantly larger than the little town we were in.)

So I whipped into an approach and performed a very quick 2 point turn, and headed back the other way.  By way of an apology I said to him: “I guess I was lost.  You were right.  What’s my name?”

We drove in total silence for about 10 miles until we came over a rise and there were the lights of the little town where I was camped and he had a hotel room.  He slapped me hard on the knee and said; “Auu-dreee-auun!”

Having grown up around Scandinavian neighbors, I was used to having my name pronounced strangely.

It didn’t take long for the story to get around about me getting lost in the countryside.  In fact one day a bunch of us were eating in a café and they gave me (a guy from Montana that lived nearby <within 100 miles>)  a pretty bad time over it.

One of my past employers came from a farm near where I grew up in North Dakota.  Growing up on the farm and working among farmers the first several years of my life, I had heard many interesting farmer stories.  One time while the boss and I were visiting with a number of people with a farming background, I couldn’t resist sharing one of my “farming stories” with them.

One of the farmers near where I had grown up had a calf that he kept inside his barn in a calf pen over the winter.  All farmers know that when you keep animals in the barn over the winter one of the natural consequences is that you have to clean out the barn floor periodically.  In practical terms this means that you must pitch the manure from an individual pen out into the main floor area of the barn.  It’s not a pleasant job.  Then you must follow up with transporting the manure from the barn floor to the manure pile outside.

After cleaning the manure out of the pen and the barn, the farmer would then replace the straw on the floor of the pen with fresh straw.  Over the course of a winter this would happen several times.

Though the job has warmth to it, it is not an inviting occupation to consider or to accomplish.  The farmer decided that, instead of go to all that work during the winter months, he would just add some fresh straw to the calf pen every so often.  When the build-up attained a height that would render the pen railing irrelevant, he would nail on another rail.

By the time spring came the calf was standing with his head up to the ceiling of the barn.  (To be sure, though it was many years ago, I don’t believe the barn was one of those tall red ones that we associate with the word “barn.”)  In the spring when the farmer decided to let the calf out, the calf was too frightened to come down off of his manure mountain.

If the calf had decided to jump down, there was a strong possibility that it would have broken a leg.  The calf was too big for the farmer to pick up.  The farmer had to rig up a winch and winch the calf out of the pen and down to the barn floor.

To a farmer this is a very humorous story.  I was surprised that, with his background, my boss wasn’t laughing.  In fact, he seemed a little pale.  He got very quiet.

I never asked him which farm he had grown up on.

Before you tell a story, it is a good idea to weigh the circumstances and possible consequences.

Oh well.  Hwe was rather difficult to get along with anyway.

I have come to a conclusion regarding valuable work.  There are two qualities that are valuable in the electrical trade.  Doing good, safe work makes you a valuable employee.  Doing good, safe work and doing it quickly makes you irreplaceable.  However, since there is an inherent danger to working with electricity sometimes working quickly in one aspect of the job is not always conducive to safety.  Therefore doing poor, unsafe work quickly, takes away an employee’s value.

When you are working for a small shop, yours or another person’s, there is no such thing as steady work.  There are weeks when there is nothing to do.  No calls come in, so you have to go out and hunt for work, and nobody wants or needs you.  The next week you may be running.  Everybody wants you – all at the same time.  This situation can lead to many interesting experiences.

One time I was working on a job way north of Havre, Montana near the Canadian border.  It was one of those times when we were trying to catch up or stay even with all of the calls.  I was hurrying home with just a few tools in the back of the company pick-up.  It was a gravel road and there wasn’t a posted speed limit, but my speed was about “way to fast” miles per hour.

I hit a washboard in the road.  To the un-countrified, a washboard is a ripple in the road.  It’s more than the ripples you will get on some streets at an intersection, where traffic patterns wear a series of rough ridges in pavement or graveled roads.  It is more than driving over a portion of road that makes you and all of your passengers involuntarily go “ddddddrrrrrrrrr.”  This was a washboard that stretched about three feet from crest to crest.

I’m not sure if I grabbed air at all much less how much air I grabbed if I did, but that washboard threw the pick-up all over the road, down a steep bank, and into the ditch.  I managed to stay in control of the pick-up, mostly.  The pick-up stayed wheels down and under power.  But I was still in a hurry, and I didn’t slow down – much, much less stop.

There was a steep bank on the right and a fence on the left.  I continued my way home steadily along that ditch for about ½ of a mile until I came to an approach.  I maneuvered my way out of the ditch and onto the approach and back onto the road.

Yes, I still hurried home but it scared me enough that I slowed down my driving, … somewhat.