Pardom my French

But ahhh shit. I just heard yesterday that the Brightwater project will be down for months. For those of you not from around here it's a large sewage treatment plant being built here with a tunnel (17 feet in diameter) discharge pipe 300+ feet below ground that goes from Woodinville, Wa out a mile into the Puget Sound. That's about six or seven miles. They've been working on it for a while now. The bore head has some type of damage so they had to shut down. I have a little understanding of boring having done core drills in various buildings here. There's only a few things that can go wrong in the process. Either the drill bit goes dull and you have to change it or the clutch gets screwed up and needs repaired or there's a power problem. Most of these problems in doing core drills can be fixed in less than a day. In doing a boring operation it's a different story. It probably took them a couple of weeks to set up the machine and now that it's in place it will take even longer to dismantle and have remanufactured. Even with doing simple core drills it takes 2/3 of the time just to do set up.
So how does this effect me directly? I do haz mat work, but I also happen to be in the same union as these tunnel rats and now 60 of them are out of work. Usually by this time of year the union hall is nearly empty of workers. All out on jobs. Not this year. There's been three to four hundred of us on the bench waiting for any scrap of work to come up. In fact in the last four weeks only five guys were called out on some short clean up jobs. Now there's 60 more on the list. But you would think that they would go to the back of the line which is usually the case. It doesn't always work that way. It also goes by certifications as well. If you have what an employer needs you get to go to the head of the line. It's happened to me a couple of times but not this year or last.
I've looked through every job board on the internet. The only things out there would take another four year degree and a half dozen years experience. Most of what's left are RN / LPNs, homecare worker, newspaper subscription sales, or table dancer. If I even considered healthcare I'd be like Dr. House. Sorry lady you're going to die get over it. Homecare worker? Nope, I have enough taking care of what I have. Subscriptions? Nope get my news from the internet thank you very much as does everyone else. Yep buy a subscription and get a free buggy whip or pet rock.
Table dancer? Nope too boney to give lap dances and besides I lost my rythm years ago.
So I keep thinking. What do people need? Food, clothing, and entertainment seem to top the list. Food? Costco has that one covered. Where else can you buy a years supply of popcorn for such a cheap price? Clothing? Nope the holes in the back of the underwear haven't joined yet to make for easy mooning. Sell the clothes in my closet? Nope they wouldn't even make good car wash rags. Entertainment? Sell dirty pictures of myself on the internet as rodent repellent. Use one of these in the basment and rats are sure to leave. Counting cars in the neighborhood to see who's been laid off lately. Or watching my car grow moss from having sat so long. Can't make any money doing that.
I can only hope that some day I'll be able to look back on this as some silly memory.