Reflecting on past instances while working as a common laborer in which employers attempted to unnecessarily place me in situations endangering both health and life, I wonder now at how I somehow had sense enough to flatly refuse to succumb to such malicious stupidity.
First time it happened while roughnecking on a wildcat rig. Our crew had arrived on site shorthanded for a shift and the driller tried to force me into the chain hand position without first providing training. After a few scary goes at throwing the chain to spin up connections for tripping logging tools in and out of the borehole on the drill string, I decided it was a damn good time to quit that job and did so at the end of the shift without giving notice. Fuck that shit, boss.
The next time it happened when my employer tried to force me into standing over an ammonia gas pump still connected to the plant cooling system to hand grind its piston head seats without first thoroughly purging the system of the poisonous gas. The fumes wafting up out of the pump cylinders was just too much to bear, so again I quit without giving notice. Fuck that shit, boss.
Another instance occurred when the boss wanted me to get aboard the company's all-metal barge out on a lake while a thunderstorm was rapidly building overhead. The reason: to winch my boss's rich neighbor's dinky-ass rowboat to the surface after he allowed it to sink when he forgot to secure its drain plug before setting it afloat. The storm was already belching heavy downburst gusts and lightning was striking nearby. We were a long way from where my truck was parked at the company work yard and I had nowhere to shelter from the storm if I quit on the spot, so I just refused to get on the damned barge. The boss was pissed off about it but the storm quickly escalated, forcing us all inside his house where we watched through his kitchen window as the storm produced a tornado which snaked down out of the dark cloud and ripped out a transformer and power lines a short distance across the cove in brilliant flashes and a shower of sizzling sparks. Giving my boss credit for realizing he had been wrong, he turned to me and admitted right there in front of everyone else on the crew I was right not to get on the barge as ordered. Still, it was the second time I had effectively saved our work crew. I quit that job a few days later without giving any notice. Fuck that shit, boss.
By this time, a growing phalanx of personal injury lawyers were capitalizing on cases where OSHA was finally coming down hard on employers violating safety rules while forcing workers into dangerous situations and I never was ordered to risk limb and life again during the remaining years of my common laborer career. So fortunately upon graduation from college, I entered life working as a professional without any sort of physical disabilities I saw so many others living with after suffering severe job-related injuries which could have easily been prevented if their hard-headed employers had simply followed safety protocols. Most victims were willing to talk about how they were injured and invariably it boiled down to regretfully complying with orders from their boss which unnecessarily placed them into dangerous workplace situations.
So yeah, fuck that shit, boss.
