My Worst Jobs: Fifty Tons Of Sand

I was about nineteen. It seemed like easy money. We go to a foundry, unload a boxcar of silica sand and split $100. The guy who hired us--someone's dad--told us he'd done it by himself and it took "two, maybe three hours."



One Sunday, Bill Seguin, Kevin Curran and I drove to the Olympic Foundry in South Seattle. The foundry specialized in civic metal--fire hydrants, manhole covers, park benches, and electrical vaults. We pulled up jovial and full of coffee. There was no one in the entire place except a guard or two, a couple of foundry cats, and hundreds of rats in hiding. It was a sunny day.

We found our shovels and climbed into the boxcar. When we pushed the door open, tons of sand came spilling out. We climbed to the top of the pile and rode a wave of sand down into the sandpit below and in front of the boxcar. Over and over again we rode the waves of sand; this was going to be easy money.

And then, the sand was not tumbling out the door. Gravity had done her part; now it was our turn.

After an hour it was impossible to see that we'd made even a perceptible dent in the fifty tons of sand. Two hours later, we estimated we had unloaded one sixteenth of the sand.

It was time for lunch. Coming back was agony. The boxcar looked like it would take days to unload. Our arms and shoulders began to ache. We imagined we had been stricken with silicosis. We told sick jokes. We talked seriously. We tried to find a system to make the sand pour out the door. How the hell had Ivo been able to do it in three hours!? By six o'clock, every shovelful was agony. And we'd maybe emptied half the boxcar. Every shovelful now required a curse or a grunt. By ten o'clock, we said "forget the hundred bucks. I can't take this any more."

We left the rest of the sand. None of us could lift a shovel off the ground any longer. The next day Ivo called Bill. He expected to get reamed out for leaving all the sand. Ivo just said, "yeah, there was a little sand left. I just grabbed a broom and swept it out in a couple of minutes."

A small selection of my other worst job sagas on all this is that:

My Worst Job No. 1: McGoo (profanity alert...not safe for The Children!)
Design Insanity - Hype, Shuck, and Jive In The Dot-Com Years
My worst job 3: Brewburger
My worst jobs 4: Salsa
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