It has been almost a year now since Captain Bill retired at work. I spent nearly my whole adult life working with him and a number of other men. And a lot of those other men are retired as well. Captain Bill is/was 6’5” inches tall and is a Vietnam vet. Like all tall people he had some issues that go with that characteristic. A lot of people challenged him because he was big. Some bosses even became obsessed with him. He learned to take it all in stride. And like Sigmund Freud he saw most human motivation based on sex. Only his was the street version of it. One old timer that liked to eat so much, Freud might have said that he had an oral fixation. Bill said that food was like pussy for that guy. And through all the layoffs we always seemed to work together a lot. Picket lines, chillers, a.c. units, boilers, snow tractors, river dives, commodes, urinals, cast iron pipe, copper pipe, cast steel, welding, burning, electrical wiring, pneumatic controls, diesel engines, gas engines, snow blowers, roof leaks, chemical treatments, floods, blizzards, glycol a.c. units, weather masters, chemical feed pumps, dry wall, concrete anchors, heat load, cooling load, broken pipes, eddy currents, phantom electrical waves, harmonics, pneumatic controls, air compressors, insulation, horse power, chemical feeds, river water in the power plant, another ass beating on the picket line, bosses come and go and we stay. Bosses come, I go to Mellon Bank for two years. During another lay-off, I work at Benedum center for a while, learning about bromide absorbent chillers which use steam to cool. Bruce Springsteen plays at the Benedum and I get to watch the show from the back of the stage. I find it strange to have to work around actors and musicians, running designated circuits with the electrician for the caterers, flooded ejector pumps, float on water softener explodes, condensate lines rot out, drain in boiler room sprouts leaks, epoxy and duct tape to the rescue, impellers have to be reground on chill water pumps to fit back in housing of pump, river rises to 36 feet floods condensate pit in 5 minutes because nobody shut off vent valve, motors have to be pulled out and sent to a place to bake out the water in them. Tony Lamorte retires and gets Tit slapped at his retirement party by a woman we all paid $100 bucks for that looked like Attila the Hun. Computers come in and displace some union jobs. Computers also create some nonunion jobs. I could see from the start that computers will create a class of people with little social skills and a fear of getting dirty. They are under the illusion that sitting in front of a computer screen gives them control over everything. Flat tires on the snow tractors, replace bearings on the snow tractors shaft for brush snow removal linkage, replace fuse on 3 phase starter box of Channel Two’s condensate pump. The news goes off the air for a short while, Channel Two refuses to put chlorine in their river water and fresh water clams are polluting the main power plants river water, pressure regulators need replaced, have to thread ¾” inch pipe to install chemical feeds on boilers, have to cut and thread 1 ¼” inch pipe for new boiler feed pumps, have to change oil on air compressors on fire pump dry systems, replace packing on diesel fire pumps, welded hydraulic pump onto gravely tractor for snow removal, every winter river water temperature drops into the low 30’s and we can shut the air conditioning off and cool all the computer banks in the complex with cold river water. Very green application for a power plant built in the 1950’s, put new starter on the gator, government work rebuilding an outboard motor on the fishing boat, welding condensate lines, have to relearn how to calibrate thermostats for comfort air, replace 150 bathroom faucets, have to deal with phony businessmen who think cutting jobs saves the company money. The chaos that follows working with new bosses. Continue studying dentistry in the boiler room, do a few root canals and crowns, thinking about doing brain surgery, sex change operations are proposed (Bill Shea) was the first to propose this on some of our co-workers. If we can’t do it in Local 95 maybe it cannot be done…space travel might be next. Captain Bill have a good retirement I’ll see you up on Lake Erie. You never flinched even when the bloodsuckers tried to fire us. So when you’re on your boat on Lake Erie pulling in those 8 pound walleyes, when the wind flares up, I know we can count on you shaking up your fishing buddies when you jump off the boat nude into a 10 foot swell to clean off the sides of the boat. Semper-fi bro….