The shrill sound of a bluejay in the grove of trees to his left startled Fran out of his daydreaming. He peered up into the treetops to see if he could spot the raucous bird, to no avail. He used to both love and hate those damned bluejays back when he was still regularly hunting deer during the Minnesota gun season in early November.
Love them, because they would frequently warn him when a deer might be approaching……and hate them, because they would frequently warn any deer when he might be approaching. Fran smiled at this incongruity, a smile left frozen on his face when the time machine appeared out of nowhere and whisked him back at warp speed to an earlier station in his lifetime…….
………working with all those fuckin’ mixing chemicals was an absolute bitch, let me tell you! Fran shook his head back and forth in disbelief at the odious memory……
When Fran Blahnik begrudgingly left dairy farming in the late fall of 1977 and entered the local workforce, there weren’t too many businesses clamoring to hire someone with a two-year degree in animal husbandry, even an individual with a naturally keen intellect augmented by a shitload of ambition like Fran’s. ‘Twas a buyer’s market for employers back in those bygone days when the hapless, overmatched Jimmy Carter took up residence in the White House at taxpayers’ expense for four interminable years, but that was the closest that uncharismatic miscreant ever came to being genuinely presidential, one might say.
In any event, Fran felt damned lucky to even find what he did: Entry-level, blue-collar labor paying scarcely above the minimum wage at a small fiberglass manufacturing plant outlying the nearby village of Chatfield. And then when he did start working at the place, it wasn’t like Fran pompously strutted through the front door of the business and handed his new boss a checklist of all the things–overwhelmingly niceties interspersed with flowery amenities, of course–that he would consent to doing as grounds for employment.
No, Francis Blahnik did walk through the front door of that picayune factory, all right, and his asshole boss was then more than eager to delegate him the distasteful chore of mixing giant batches of resin from which raw fiberglass later evolved through the paltrusion process.
And what the fuck could he–Fran Blahnik, the erstwhile dairy farmer from somewhere over near Spring Valley–do about it???
NOT A GODDAMNED THING, THAT’S WHAT!!!!!
He was the lowest man on the totem pole, for Christ’s sake; if the stupid buttfucker outranking him at the manufacturing plant had ordered Fran to bend over and suck his undersized dick while the bastard scratched contentedly on his own hairy ass, Fran probably would have acquiesced to that demeaning task too, while smilingly volunteering for an encore performance if it meant greater job security for him. Fran had a wife and young family at home to look after and feed and a multitude of bills to pay every month; he surely wasn’t in any position to be picky about gainful employment back then.
Anyway, so Fran was stuck mixing those fuckin’ hazardous chemicals the first few years he was on the job in the late ‘70s. The component chemicals for fiberglass–silicon dioxide, calcium oxide, aluminum oxide, boron oxide, plus a few others as well–those were intrinsically okay; those weren’t the ones that scared him half silly.
Oh, you obviously didn’t want to take a big whiff of any of the aforementioned or you would doubtless cough for a long while afterwards like an asthmatic reprobate, and you didn’t want to get them all over your skin either cuz the chemicals in question likely would itch like holy hell for a sizable period of time afterwards too, but the chief ingredients in making fiberglass were generally manageable and benign. It was the industrial-strength solvents they used for cleaning purposes at the plant–benzene, acetone, and others–that scared the living shit out of Fran.
Believe me when I say this: Those toxic motherfuckers were SUPER potent and more lethal than an enraged mother grizzly bear…….
But don’t allow your mind to wander too far ahead and wind up drawing the wrong conclusion here, Reader!!!
The modest-sized company Fran worked for was conscientious and legitimately interested in worker safety and religiously followed federally mandated regulations, and federal government watchdog OSHA would naturally pay regular visits to the firm’s chief manufacturing site to further ensure workplace compliance. Yet those basic protections did little to alleviate Fran’s burgeoning fear: It just plain and simple was not safe doing what he was doing five days of the week……
Fran knew–deep down in the furthest reaches of his soul–that it wasn’t healthful being constantly exposed to insidiously harmful chemicals Monday through Friday virtually every week of the year, even if they theoretically were being closely monitored. The toll those bastards would extract from one’s body may not happen today……or tomorrow……or the day after that…….or even in the next month or the next year…….but the malevolent cocksuckers would take their pernicious revenge on one’s body some day; Fran was absolutely positive of that fact and it gnawed unrelentingly at his psyche.
After a few years of mixing resin, Fran was offered the opportunity to move up to an apprentice machinist position at the rapidly expanding company. He leaped at the opportunity. The starting pay was much better, for one thing, yet more than anything it afforded him the opportunity to leave those dreaded solvents behind and move on to something immanently safer and sans obvious potential health repercussions. When the day finally arrived to start this new job Fran rejoiced like crazy, knowing full well that he wouldn’t miss the Faustian chemicals he was leaving behind one tiny bit.
Because had he been forced to spend the rest of his professional career continuing to work closely with fiberglass ingredients but especially their treacherous solvents each day for a living, Fran reflected with an inscrutable grin audibly complemented by a humongous sigh of relief, well…….who really knows what untoward things might happen to his long-term physical health stemming from that tsunami of unwanted toxic exposure???
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