Paul Alton MBA

In the Oil Patch there are a lot of Maritimers. One of their additions to the OP dialect is the term "Buddy".

Everybody is named "Buddy".

"Hey, Buddy" one safety office addressed me. I asked her how she knew my name. We both laughed.

Well Tales of Buddy is a section where I tell stories about people. Most of them are real people with the name changed to Buddy to protect both them and me. Sometimes the story will be about me and the name is changed to Buddy just to protect me. And maybe they are fictional, but mostly not.

Stories will be sporatic with the newer ones appearing at the top of the page. When a new story is added I will try to remember to link to it from the home page or a monthly update page.

Enjoy!

Buddy is a millwright. Millwrights were the people who built and repaired the mills of the past, hence the archaic term. The more proper modern term is industrial mechanic, but everybody still calls them millwrights. They install and repair industrial machinery.

Buddy and a buddy were vacationing in a village in Greece. The locals were building a road over the mountain. He asked why they were going to such efforts. They explained they needed the road to haul water to the village. They used to have a pump, but it quit working.

“Show me this pump.”

They fired up the generator that powered the electric motor that spun the pump. Giant sucking noises of air going into the packing gland. The pump was too busy sucking air to suck water.

“Shut it down”

“Get me some leather and some grease and some socks!”

He filled the packing gland with the mixture of pieces of leather, socks and gobs of grease.

He said, “Try the pump now” and to the guy staring into the empty pipe, “I don’t think you want to do that.”

Water shot out of the end of the pipe. No more need to manually hack a road out of the rock over the mountain. Time to carry Buddy and his buddy on their shoulders around the village.

Free local booze for them for the balance of their stay.

Not all heroes wear capes!

Buddy had worked as a body man for years. He set up a body shop next to his rural house and went to work for himself. We were friends. I helped a little with the carpentry to build the shop, then built an air drier for him when the first car he painted had droplets of water skipping across the hood, forcing him to start over on the paint job.

Things improved and business grew, but Buddy started having breathing difficulties especially with certain types of paint. He was referred to the Worker’s Compensation Board medical centre. They told him to go out and buy a can of the paint he used. When he returned, they had him paint a board using a brush.

He protested, “This is nothing like how I paint!”

“When I work, I am in a fog of the stuff. This doesn’t bother me at all.”

His measured lung capacity after painting the board with a brush was fifty percent of what it was before starting. Who knows what it was when he was using a spray gun. He tried using an air pack, but it wasn’t enough. He moved away and started a different type of business with no paint involved. I moved away a few years later as well. We lost touch. Hope he is doing well. I am not optimistic. That was more than thirty years ago.

Buddy did outreach work in Mexico and would interact with various local pastors. One pastor was a sad case who had been in a motorcycle accident, walked with a limp and had facial damage affecting his speech. Every time he ran into this pastor, he was asked to visit his church. Occasionally he would and would speak briefly to the tiny congregation of five people sitting on one pew in this shack of a church. One time he brought a friend who disparaged the pastor, the church and the content of the pastor’s message. Buddy bought into his friend’s unkind words and started shunning the pastor.

After six months Buddy was feeling guilty and the next time he met the pastor agreed to come speak Sunday evening. The only people at the service were the pastor, his wife and daughter. Buddy brooded on this and the next time a group of volunteers asked if he knew of a congregation that needed a church he told them this pastor did.

The group bought the materials and came and built a church. They also put up a prefab parsonage next door. Buddy promoted the new church building with movies every night for a week. People came and enough of them stayed. The congregation grew to a respectable size. Guilt assuaged. All is good!

Several months later a member of the congregation called Buddy. The pastor has kicked us all out because a church member’s kid stole the radio from the pastor’s car. Buddy went over and talked the pastor off the ledge. The pastor apologized to the congregation. More movies. More growth. All is well again.

Several months go by. A congregant calls again. They have all been banished by the pastor. Buddy goes to the church. The pastor has moved in his furniture. “Welcome to my home.” “You can’t do that” “Yes, I can but you can buy the church from me for $3,000.” The church building group will be in the area in three months. They will want to check in on “their” church that they built. Buddy can’t have them see it full of furniture.

After a bit more dialog and some lawyers, Buddy scrapes up the 3k. He buys the building and gifts it to a more capable and honest pastor who is there with a thriving congregation to this day. What isn’t there is the parsonage. The old pastor took it with him.

Buddy worked as a referee for wrestling years ago in western Canada. 

He and the wrestlers would ride share from one venue to the next. The discussion among the wrestlers would be, “I won in the last town. It’s your turn in the next town.” Sounds fair.

Sort of like the uniparty in the last few decades. We’ll keep the rubes entertained and split the gate. That might be part of the reason there was so much “bi-partisan” over-reaction to Trump being elected. We can’t have an outsider interfering in our charade.

Buddy was a lodge mate of my father. He was in the BC provincial police force until policing was farmed out to the RCMP. He wasn’t RCMP material and changed careers to hardware sales. One story he related from his policing days was sitting at the roadside watching an intersection in Ladner. A car was stopped waiting for the red light to change. A car came over the hill and rear ended the sitting car. Buddy and his partner interviewed the drunk driver of the offending car.

His excuse?

“He stopped so fast!”

Kittens are delightful. Everyone thinks so. Kittens grow into cats which have their fans and not so fans.

Piglets can follow a similar trajectory. Delightful to handful. Pet to pest.

A missionary video I watched recently had a few cameos of a pig. It lived at the Shiloh base camp in Nicaragua until this past week. She was moved to a more agricultural setting as breeding stock. Probably didn’t appreciate going from full reign of the camp to a small enclosure but certainly had a better fate than Bessie. As children, my mother, her sister and cousins made a pet of piglet, Bessie. When the appointed day came, they all burst into tears at the dinner table when uncle said, “Have a bit of Bessie.”

One Friday, I asked Buddy what he was doing this weekend. “Taking the sow to be bred.”

On Monday, “How’d the weekend go?” “Not well. Spent all day Saturday unsuccessfully trying to load the sow on the truck.”

The next Friday I asked Buddy his weekend plans. “Butchering the sow.”

I spent a few summers as a student working as a pipefitter’s helper in the late 1960’s. Most of one summer that was around the newly built paper machine. I noticed that on shutdown days pipefitters would be brought from other areas of the mill. They would show up on the day of the shutdown. Each would go look at the job they were assigned and then go get the parts and the tools they needed. Usually, they would not get hands-on tools until after lunch. The work would get completed on overtime. That’s the way it was done for decades.

I went from and came back to the papermill a few times. After a few months as casual labourer in late 1970 I worked full-time there until leaving in 1987 to work in Alberta. The last twelve years was spent in the instrument department. I clocked some enjoyable overtime on paper machine maintenance shutdown days on hot standby for any start-up instrument issues. We waited for the pipefitters to finish the jobs they had started in the afternoon.

A few years after leaving I was visiting and fishing with Buddy, a fellow instrument tech.

How are things at the papermill?

He explained that things had been interesting. The pipefitters were upset over something and vowed to not work overtime. So the next paper machine shutdown day they went home at quitting time and the paper machine stayed down until they came in the next day and finished their tasks. That was unacceptable to management.

An edict came down. Pipefitters were to go to the assigned paper machine the day before a shutdown. The supervisor would take them to the task location and the task would be reviewed. Necessary tools would be identified and obtained. Parts would be pulled and staged at the task location. Work would begin at the start of the workday.

The next shutdown came along and the edict was followed. The machine started on time for the first time in memory. No more overtime was needed from the pipefitters.

Buddy worked as an Agent for the Government in a community on the east coast of Labrador.

He said when he started working there, people lived in tents. Other members of the community could and would walk into each others’ tents at will. Eventually houses were built and people had doors they could lock to maintain privacy. Before there were doors there had been no thefts within the community. Once doors could be locked and the goods concealed then theft became a bit of a problem.

Buddy grew up in Michigan in cherry orchard country. His hometown had a factory that made maraschino cherries. He worked in the factory as a teenager and described the manufacturing process to me. As part of the process cherries were in a vat for several weeks. He said when a mouse fell into the vat it came out translucent and red just like the cherries. I don’t think I’d be willing to check how it tasted in comparison.

Buddy and I worked on a SOWER project together. He was a retired lineman. He always spent the time to back into parking spots so he could make a quick getaway. He said that was company policy with the power company and it had become a habit with his own vehicles.

Before he worked for the power company, he had worked in plant that stamped out body panels for car companies. One design of roof panels for a Ford model tended to crease in the wrong spot and was producing an unacceptable level of rejects. He claimed that somebody came up with the solution to cover those reject panels with upholstery and charge a premium for padded roofs.

One time Buddy was told by his supervisor to ship some non-conforming product. He objected but his supervisor insisted. He shipped. Eventually a reprimand came down the line for Buddy having done so. The next time his supervisor made such a request Buddy was smarter. He agreed to do so, filled out an authorization form to ship non-conforming product and presented the ship slip to his supervisor for signature. His supervisor wouldn’t sign it. Buddy didn’t ship. No more reprimands from above. Nice weasel proofing, Buddy!

Buddy worked in an ice cream factory as a college student. His job much of the time was in the cold room turning over the boxes of ice cream as they entered the room on the conveyor. He claimed this was to prevent a void at one end of the box. Another job was to load cartons in the feeder. The machinery would fill the cartons with ice cream. He said he loaded house brands and the name brand cartons in the same feeder, and they were filled with the same mix for any given flavour.

There’s travelling and there’s travelling with children. On the cusp of Juanita’s pregnancy with our first child I took three months off work for us to travel while it was still fun. We began with a fourteen-day Caribbean cruise where I proved you can put on a pound a day. You have to work at it, but it can be done. You might have to go to the early breakfast buffet, eat breakfast and bring some dry toast to help your wife with her morning sickness and then accompany her to the sit-down breakfast and other diligent piggery but you can do it.

But I digress.

After the cruise we rented a Firebird and drove across Florida to Clearwater where Juanita’s uncle owned a hardware store. On the way into town, I noticed a Honeywell factory. I mentioned to Uncle Gene that I worked on Honeywell control systems and asked if they gave tours. He said he knew Pete, the manager, from little league. He’d call him. “Send your nephew over.”

I arrived at security, was issued a badge and escorted to Pete’s office. He explained that the factory made inertial guidance systems. Highly classified. It cost him $85k to clean it up for a VIP tour by a senator. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen for me, but we could visit over coffee and cookies.

He talked about his career. He explained he had been working in Phoenix and had a chance for a promotion to head office in Minneapolis. His co-workers mocked him for going to the cold north. He said it didn’t make any difference to him. He changed from living in an air-conditioned house driving an air-conditioned cat to an air-conditioned office to living in a heated house driving a heated car to a heated office.

He asked me about where I worked. I told him I worked in a large papermill with between two and three thousand employees and it had been stable for years. He sighed, “I wish I could have a stable work force. It’s all government contracts. Some years I have a thousand and some years I have four thousand.”

“How do you find skilled workers? These guys aren’t standing on street corners.”

His face lit up. “It’s easy!” “In the middle of winter I take out ads in northern papers. In the corner of the ad is a big sun with ‘Florida – Your place in the sun’, then ‘Design Engineer…” “I get hundreds of applications!”

Buddy worked for a consulting engineering firm. He was tasked with taking several Chinese nationals on a tour of mining sites to demonstrate the capability of the firm. The last leg ends in Cranbrook BC with a scheduled flight back to Vancouver. When they get to the airport there is six inches of fresh snow and more falling. Their flight has been cancelled.

He rents the last four-wheel drive vehicle available at the airport. The interpreter directs the four clients into the back seat meant for three. They’re little. They fit. None use any of the three seat belts. Buddy gets in the driver’s seat and the interpreter in the front passenger seat, and they drive off into the storm toward Vancouver.

Things go well until they are stopped for a RCMP seat belt check on the Hope-Princeton highway. He has no problem. The interpreter has no problem. They are both wearing their seat belts. The cop looks at the four denizens of the back seat all with no seat belt. They smile broadly back at him. The cop asks Buddy about them. He says, “ask them.”

The cop looks at his watch. It’s about quitting time. He looks at the backseat boys. Buddy says you can see the wheels turning. The cop says, “get out of here.”

On the road again.

Buddy lived all winter in the RV park in Regina were we often parked while working at the refinery spring shutdowns. I can only imagine. April is bad enough in an RV.

He lived as far out on the outer loop as possible. The only RV out there. One frigid morning he gets in his truck in his dressing gown and slippers and drives to the central, heated shower building. On his way back to his RV the truck got stuck in a snow drift. He decides to hoof it home. It isn’t long before he realizes it was a bad choice but he is committed to the decision. He starts running. His slippers come off. He keeps running. He makes it home and does all he can to warm his feet and the rest of him. He says it took a while.

Buddy was cruising down the west coast in his cabin cruiser. He decided to take a nap and handed the helm to his wife with instructions to keep the land on the left. Several hours later he awoke to find them still going around the same island.

Buddy grew up in wheat country when there were still threshing crews going from farm to farm.

Everybody pitched in.

The farmer’s wife pitched in, too, and fed the crew lunch. He said they hated working at his uncle’s farm. His aunt would put out skimpy quantities of food and exclaim as she removed the empty bowls from the table at the end of the meal, “Just enough!”

Buddy worked at a railway machine shop rebuilding locomotives.

One of his co-workers bought a new pickup truck. The other co-workers kept topping up the gas tank without the proud owner’s knowledge. He was beside himself with pride in his new truck and bragging constantly about its phenomenal fuel sipping trait. Until after a few months of this they started siphoning gas out every chance they got. Now he is all over the dealer with how his truck needs checking and its fuel economy restored to standard.

Buddy lived in the interior of South Africa.

He would vacation at Durban on the Indian Ocean for two weeks a year. He thought it would be wonderful to live there full-time. He could go to the beach every weekend, not just for two weeks a year.

He got a job with the telephone company and spent a year running wires in hot, dusty attics. It rained every weekend for a year.

He moved to Canada.

People sometimes romanticize their passing.

Buddy was working as a steward in the dining room on a ferry from the lower mainland to Vancouver Island. One blustery evening his boss asks him to go with this woman.

She was carrying her brother’s ashes.

His request was that his ashes be scattered in Active Pass.

The ferry entered Active Pass.

She threw the ashes.

The wind caught them and slapped them against the ship’s funnel. The rain washed them off the funnel. They oozed across the deck into the scuppers and overboard. Buddy and the women went inside. Probably not quite like her brother had pictured the event.

Buddy’s wife announced that now the kids were finished high school she no longer had to cook breakfasts and he was on his own. He said “okay”.

The next work day came along and Buddy remained in bed past his normal time of getting up. His wife said, “Buddy. What’s wrong?” He replied, “No breakfast. No work.”

She resumed making breakfasts.

Buddy worked as an instrument engineer in a paper mill in Japan in the fifties and sixties. One day some research group set up a paper caliper (thickness) measuring instrument. It was a C-Framed device with a readout. For the demo the researchers had set up a belt of paper that fed through in a continuous loop to simulate the web on a paper machine.

He contemplated this device and considered the changing environmental conditions in a paper machine room. He walked over and blew on the C-frame. The reading went nuts. He walked away. So did everybody else. Not much value to an instrument that can’t handle a draft of air.

Earlier in life he had lived through WWII in Japan. He told of him and his brother running to avoid being strafed by a fighter plane. They would collect dud incendiary bombs and cut them open for the fuel for their mother to cook with.

Buddy had a black eye. I asked him what happened.

Well, you know I’m Swedish. I was drinking with my neighbour who is also Swedish. We both had too much to drink. I got up to leave his house. On my way out the door I stumbled on the threshold. I said, “Big, dumb Swede!” Referring to myself. He thought I meant him.

A number of years ago I took a quick certification course for scuba diving on a Caribbean island. When the classroom session was over the participants loaded into an open bus and headed across the tropical island to actually dive. There was one boisterous fellow from St. Louis. He announced his future plans to all who wanted to hear and many who didn’t. With his new found knowledge and skills he was going to purchase some diving gear and go on weekends to a lake where people dove about two hours from his home.

We got to the beach, donned our gear and walked into the water until it was above our heads and even more. Boisterous Buddy must have had some sort of inner ear issue. He started uncontrollably spinning.

The instructor grabbed hold of him and led him back to the beach and said “Sit here and wait for us.”

The rest of us had an enjoyable dive. 

Buddy was quiet on the drive back across the island. 

Buddy is a techie. Has been all his life. When he was in the army in Vietnam he did classified, techie stuff. He still recalls with a hint of bitterness the day he realized that those nice marines were not there to protect him and his techie buddies.

They were there to make sure their knowledge didn’t fall into enemy hands. By any means necessary.

Buddy was born during the Second World War in Germany. He was a baby when his father was taken prisoner. He was a school boy when his father returned from being a POW in a Russian camp. He was so happy his father was home.

At their first meal together as a reunited family his mother served cabbage. He whined, “I don’t like cabbage!” A quick slap to the head stopped the whining and made him reconsider his enthusiasm for his Dad’s return.

I had a boss that worked for Vancouver Sun in rural distribution in BC when he was about 20. A former co-worker of his said that my boss would hitch hike and put in an expense report for Greyhound.

He’d order a cup of hot water in a cafe and make soup with their ketchup and put in expenses for a meal. He was bragging one year he had put $3k into savings. His boss said, “how did you do that? We only paid you $2k."

Do you suppose that our politicians got rich by pinching pennies?

Against his boss’s advice Buddy put his motorcycle and a bunch of his other stuff into a rented storage locker for $100 a month.

Then off he went to Southeast Asia to do a power plant start-up.

He dropped his jacket into a garbage can at a stopover in Osaka and didn’t own a jacket until he returned to Canada two years later.

All his treasures had lost their lustre over twenty-four months. Everything except his motorcycle went into the dumpster. The bike sold for $2,400. A wash!

Buddy was a good mechanic but not much of a businessman. He started a service station, but quickly ran into trouble. Friends would come in, get their cars repaired and go to pay. He would say, “you can pay me later.”

That seldom happened. 

The money set aside to ransom the car got spent and the customer didn’t set aside any for “later’. Eventually Buddy’s businessman father-in-law stepped in to take care of the business side of things and Buddy concentrated on fixing cars.

That worked better.

Buddy built a two-story retirement home for himself and his wife of many years. One day he was up on the steep roof and started sliding and couldn’t stop. He got tangled in the top of the extension ladder he had used to access the roof. He and the ladder thus entwined fell to the ground.

As he lay on the ground in a world of hurt but with nothing broken, his wife came out of the house and declared, “See! I told you you were too old to be on the roof.”

Based on that and other simmering grievances he decided he was not too old to divorce her. For the last ten years he has been married to a more pleasant, much younger wife in Mexico.

My wife dropped me at the exhibition grounds in Vancouver and drove off to circle the long blocks. I walked onto the property and went to the conference we were not attending and bought a box of books from their book display. 

Returning to the street I stood in the light drizzle holding my box and waited for her return. As I waited a grizzled old guy in a slicker pushed his laden bicycle up the street. Half the handle bar was missing but he had hose clamped a stick of wood onto the existing half to serve as the missing half. I thought it would suck to be him and was glad I wasn’t in his circumstances. However, the longer I stood in the rain waiting the less glad I was about anything.

Eventually my wife and car arrived and my wife moved into the passenger seat. I put the box in the trunk and got into the driver’s seat. 

“Where have you been?” 

“Oh. I saw this sad old guy pushing a bike and I went to McDonald’s and bought him a coffee and an egg McMuffin.”

We drove around for a long time looking, with no luck until we spotted him coming out of a Burger King. I pulled to the curb and said, “Go do your thing.” “Oh no. Couldn’t you do it?”

This went back and forth for a while with the predictable outcome. I got out of the car with the paper sack and walked across the sidewalk to the old man. 

“Hello sir. My wife and I would like you to have this egg McMuffin and a cup of coffee.”

“I can buy my own coffee. I don’t need you to buy me coffee. You can stick your egg McMuffin up your …”

“Thank you sir. Have a nice day.”

Back in the car. “That went well”

I guess Buddy was more of a Burger King than a McDonald’s kind of guy.

Sage Approach

Buddy had lived in or around Roswell, New Mexico most of his life. He decided he had had enough of sage brush and headed to BC to check out the coast. Half way through Oregon on the way there by bus he was starting to get nervous. He’d still seen nothing but sage brush.

Things improved, though, and he got to the coast, and he liked what he saw. He ended up in my home town and looked at a lot of waterfront properties with many of the local realtors. He found nothing that quite suited his needs. He left his phone number with the realtors and returned to New Mexico.

One day he got a call from a realtor with less than sterling reputation. Buddy said he discounted everything he was told by fifty percent and decided that the property would do and bought it over the phone. He said when he finally saw the property it was half as good as described and he was well pleased.

Some years later I happened to be in a coffee shop with the same realtor. He was showing me what I knew to be a $3 watch bought from some itinerant pedlar for $20. He declared that he was a little suspicious, but was reassured when the pedlar presented a business license from the town. “I knew he was okay then”.

With, what was for me, enormous self restraint, I did not raise the obvious point that the realtor, too, had a local business license.

Buddy opened his lunch kit and removed his sandwiches. He grumbled about the way they had been cut by his wife. In the helpful manner of co-workers the world over, we all pitched in and said, “Buddy, don’t put up that. Go home and straighten her out.”

I guess he foolishly followed our “advice”.

The very next day he opened his lunch kit, took out his sandwiches, took out a knife. He cut them just the way he liked them to be cut.

I moved on to another work area, but happened to be there at break time about ten years later. He still had his knife. I conjecture that he never had a sandwich cut not to his liking ever again after he “went home and sorted her out.”

As a pulp tester on shift I got to watch things happen without being directly involved. One day they were having a lot of trouble with getting pulp wood into the groundwood pulp mill. The wood was sixty inch long round wood that had travelled the length of the paper mill property floating in a water filled flume. At the end of the journey the wood floated onto an inclined set of spiked rollers. The spike rolls were driven by hydraulic motors.

When things were working as they should the logs travelled up the spike rolls shedding their water on the way, landed on a short conveyor belt and went down a chute to be fed into pulp wood grinders. That day wasn’t one of those days when things were working as they should.

Panic Buddy was shift supervisor. He had the millwrights sort of working on the sort of working spike roll drives. Meanwhile he had pulp mill workers use pike poles to drag logs up the incline. The spikes are designed to dig into the wet, slippery logs and move them up the incline. When stopped they offered a fair bit of resistance to having logs dragged over them.

There were 13 Watrous Great Northern grinders in that pulp mill. Hand-bombing wood up the spike rolls didn’t satisfy their appetite. Soon they were only four grinders making pulp, then three, then two, then back up to three and so all day.

Production wasn’t the only casualty. Quality suffered as well.

Shift change happened. Panic Buddy handed over the reins to the evening shift production supervisor. He said, “Get out of the way of the millwrights. Shut down the spike rolls and let them do their job.”

They did.

The millwrights did.

Operating grinders quickly went to zero.

In an hour or two the millwrights were done. The spike rolls were running. One grinder operating. Then two. Then three. All the way up to the max available to operate.

Everybody settled into a calm shift of making lots of good quality pulp.

Panic had left the building.

Buddy ran the northeast service center for a multinational electrical company. One day a motor came into their machine shop. It was double ended with a shaft that came out both ends of the housing. The work order was to remove the shaft from one end of the motor so it could be used in a single ended application.

Day shift machined off the one shaft.

Night shift came on and machined off the other end.

Oops.

I suspect the motor owner got a deep discount on a replacement motor. Another buddy went to the city with his near new car and came back with a brand new car. “What happened?” “They had my car up on the hoist for an oil change and lowered the hoist with the car door open. It hung up on an oil barrel. They practically gave me this new car.”

We hiked the Somoto Canyon in Nicaragua. It’s a mixture of trails, shallow water hiking and floating down the river for a few hours. At one point there is what looks to be a thirty-foot jump that one can make into a deep pool. The guide offers advice of how to hold your legs and not to yell and maybe some other hints that I can’t remember. Not that I would need that advice. Just not the sort of thing I would willingly do.

Some of the others in the group took their turns. Buddy didn’t. This was his second time hiking the canyon. He was returning with his girlfriend who hadn’t done it before. He said on the previous trip he had made the plunge. He also said that two girls on that hike had jumped. One had kicked her legs and yelled, counter to guidance. She landed hard, felt immediate pain but was able to hike the rest of the way out of the canyon.

A few weeks later elsewhere in Nicaragua Buddy ran into her companion. “Where’s your friend?” “Oh. She ended up in hospital, hemorrhaging from the jump. Her parents came down from the States and had her med-evacced home.”

Buddy’s father-in-law was missing and presumed drowned. His overturned boat had been found on the Fraser River. Eventually he was declared dead. The life insurance companies paid out death benefits but his union hall refused. They knew he had staged his death and was working in his trade in Australia.

Eventually he came back to Canada. What happened then? Your guess is as good as mine.

Buddy’s house in our small northern Saskatchewan town was broken into. He reported the break-in to the local police and his insurer, listing what was taken. Six months later he realized more was taken than originally thought.

He finished the roll of film in a disposable camera that had been around for about a year. When the photos came back they included photos the burglars had taken of each other. He gave the photos to the police and they took it from there.

Buddy arrived on his hard-tailed Harley during the confused period of a pulp mill start-up. His Electrical/Instrument skills were absent, but he was a cheerful and willing worker. He was willing to go into a man basket hanging off a crane and strip damaged teck cables off the legs of the log loading crane which was more than any of the electricians were willing to do.

He was willing to do other things as well.

One day the supervisor was complaining about the neighbour’s dog barking keeping him awake over many nights. The next day Buddy came in and announced, “You won’t have to worry about that dog anymore, Boss.”

The supervisor was horrified, but what could he do? A contractor at the table queried, “You and I are okay, aren’t we, Steve?”

Buddy went to town on an errand with the shop van. The police detained him for something else he had been willing to do. We sent somebody to pick up the van and stopped wondered what we were going to do about Buddy. He did come back into our lives once more when he came across some company cheques while doing some cleaning as a contract labourer. He wrote one to himself for $129 and cashed it. Some sharp-eyed head office type noticed the signatures didn’t match the ones on file and Buddy had another close encounter with the police.

A friend sent me a link to Scanner Bin - the Clever Document Scanning Solution USA Link He was mocking somebody buying something that was basically a cardboard box. He had a point. This was not just any box, mind you. Somebody had done the work to make a cardboard box that was just the right size and which folded up into a flat package so you could slip it into your briefcase. And there was an optional LED light strip that gave shadow-free “scanning”. I can see if you had a daily need for this that there could be value in buying it. Your time wouldn’t have to be worth much before it wouldn’t be worth it to search for just the right size box and box-cutter it without box-cuttering yourself and then the light source…

You could order one, copy it and send it back. Seems unethical not to mention being petty. Come on, man! You’d do that for fifteen bucks? Unfaithful in the small things? What could that extrapolate to?

I worked with somebody who was that frugal and focussed. He ordered a bracket for a trolling motor. It had plastic coated mild steel pieces that clamped around the outdrive of your inboard/outboard boat motor. The metal pieces were attached to a thick piece of plywood that you clamped your trolling motor to. Voila! You could now steer your trolling motor from the steering wheel of the boat. Inside. Out of the sun and rain. No need to hang your butt over the transom when you were trolling for salmon. Seems like a great idea. I’d be suspicious of the additional stresses on the outdrive when you were bouncing along cutting across the waves at high speed, but he wasn’t.

The trolling motor bracket arrived in the post. He brought it into our workshop in the paper mill and copied the metal pieces. He used company supplied stainless steel on company time. Way better than plastic coated mild steel as far as corrosion resistance goes. Might not be quite as strong, but strong enough, I guess. Never heard of his trolling motor falling off. He did spend some of his own time at home cutting some wood for the clamping bracket, but not much. Certainly on a cost-benefit basis he got his time’s worth when he sent the bracket back for a hundred dollar refund. I’ve got logs in my eyes so not worried about his twigs. The transaction is instructive, however. He is a millionaire now. I’m not. Everything has a price. If you want something are you willing to pay the price? Choose wisely.

Buddy worked at another pulp mill before coming to the paper mill where we both worked in the instrumentation department as technicians. He told me a curious tale of somebody who developed his own work rules.

Each day all the instrument technicians would line up and each be handed their two work orders for the day. This one individual, and individual he was, took his two work orders and went off and completed them just like everybody else. Unlike everybody else who managed to milk their work orders and take all day to do them he just settled in and got to work. Then he went home. Usually by ten o’clock. All the others stayed until four-thirty. This drove his supervisor even crazier than the average instrumentation supervisor (disclosure – I’ve been one).

The individual was told he couldn’t do that and put in for eight hours pay. “Why not? I’m doing as much work as everyone else. I’m not the problem. If you give them more work you can give me more work.” Apparently, some familial relationship with a member of the board of directors for the corporation prevented the supervisor from taking disciplinary action. I have no idea how or if the situation resolved itself. My wild guess is that the individual got bored and wandered away, but that is just a guess.

Years after hearing that story I had a job where I analyzed a company my employer was thinking of buying. This company had institutionalized the above practice. They had six production lines. For any given product run they would take the pinch point of the line and determine 300 minutes worth of production. That’s five hours. Add an hour for clean-up and you can go home with eight hours pay when you have made five hours of product. I have never seen a more energized work place. The work crew represented the United Nations with people from all over the planet, but they worked together seamlessly. The goal of many of them was to be home in time to watch the soaps.

Of course, there were constraints. If quality issues arose from shoving stuff through that would come back and cause reductions in past pay. However, if a crew member called in sick the rest of the crew had the option to share his work load and his pay as well.

If a production run was close to completion the crew could keep working to fill the order and build up credits for days when the production line broke down and it was impossible to make the five-hour production target. When I analyzed the operation it was paying people with five years experience about twice what its competition paid and it was getting about four times the productivity as its competitors. Talk about alignment of interests between employee and business owner!

This operation had the simplest and most effective key performance indicator system I have seen. It summed the production and contribution margin for each production line. This took about ten minutes a day to know which line was producing the most contribution toward the operation’s fixed costs and if the operation had kept their head above water the day before.  

Some years ago I was having dinner with the national sales manager of a control valve company. He was around 60 and told me he had had his own valve company for years and sold it for millions of dollars and retired to Florida when he was 51. Every day he would go to the golf course and play golf with other retired men. They were all closer to seventy than to fifty and had the health problems that can go with that territory.

He would hear them complain about “my hip this and my gall bladder that and so on.” He told he that he came to realize that if he carried on like this every day he would fall prey to all these ailments. So he wandered out of retirement and found a job that used his skills and kept him around younger, healthy people.

Another buddy worked at a uranium mine. They worked a schedule of one or two weeks in camp at the mine and an equivalent time back home. In his case, home was Saskatoon. His buddy, a millwright, decided he’d finally had enough of work and decided to retire to Saskatoon.

Upper class people train for leisure with hobbies and leisure pursuits. Working class people tend to have their life and skills built around working. Without having to work the retired millwright soon got bored. He took a part-time job pumping gas at near minimum wage, but at least it got him out of the house. It wasn’t long before his employer realized that he had skills as a mechanic and put him to work in the service bay. It wasn’t much more time after that he found himself working five or six days a week of every week for not much more than minimum wage.

The light came on, as they say. The now enlightened millwright realized that working half time in camp as an industrial mechanic at industrial wages was a way better deal than working full-time as an auto mechanic at service station wages. He went back to the uranium mine and had half his life back.  

Everybody wastes some money. Some people waste a lot. Others only a bit. Nobody is perfectly consistent, but we all have some mental model of spending that we more or less follow. I mentioned in Jail Mindset somebody who was willing to go to jail to save money.

Last week we were in Matagalpa. There was a weigh scale in the Pali for one Cordoba. I would use it on the way to breakfast. Here, in Esteli there is a scale in the Pali around the corner. It is the same basic scale, but costs two Cordobas. The break even point over buying a bathroom scale in Matagalpa is 3.4 years and in Esteli 1.7 years. If we lived here I would definitely own my own. I’d be weighing myself the same time, same state of undress, same alimental situation every day. That would be worth it to me. Maybe not to you.

We belong to a group of couples who volunteer to help various ministries. Most couples have cards that they share with their names and contact information. Buddy was telling me he met one guy who was more frugal than either of us would expect to be. His wife died. He remarried. Rather than waste all those perfectly good cards he scratched out the name of the former wife and wrote the name of the new one on the card in ink. I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been pencil.

One time a distant relative came into our lives for a brief period. He was a total dunce when it came to investments in technical terms, but consider what certain habits accomplished. He only carried a little cash, had no credit cards and carried no cheques. If he saw something he thought he’d like to buy, he had to go to the bank and withdraw the money. That created enough friction that he hardly ever did. He had all the normal shop tools of a homeowner, but had only bought them after careful consideration. He owned a number of houses. He and his family bought their first house and paid the mortgage off early and moved out and rented it out and bought a second house as a family home and paid it off. Rinse repeat.

With consistent frugality he accumulated several houses in one of the more expensive real estate markets in the U.S. He had bags of silver coins in his attic and hundreds of thousands of dollars lying dormant in savings accounts. So not very bright at investment, but a whiz at frugality blessed by a good job and an expanding economy.

I remember buttermilk from when I was a child and my memory is that it is vile. Tastes change, however, and I had been pondering whether it would still taste as vile to my adult palate. This was just idle thought that didn’t rise to the commitment level of buying a whole quart or liter of buttermilk. Then one day Buddy mentioned when he went to Cracker Barrel he always had a bowl of pinto beans and a glass of buttermilk. This was a commitment level I could embrace.

The next time we were in Cracker Barrel I ordered a bowl of pinto beans and a glass of buttermilk. “I’m sorry, sir. We do not have buttermilk.”  “Oh. Okay.” A while later I ran into Buddy. “I thought you said you order pinto beans and a glass of buttermilk when you go to Cracker Barrel. I tried that and they said they don’t have buttermilk.” “Yeh. They tell me that, too. I just ask them if they have buttermilk pancakes. They say they do. Then I ask them what they make them with. They come out with a glass of buttermilk every time.”

Before we got back to Cracker Barrel I was in a supermarket which had half-pint bottles of buttermilk. “Worth a try,” I thought. Nope. Tasted just as vile as I remembered. People sure have different tastes.

Speaking of differences, I was working with a fellow one time. He told me his life story. He was married to his first wife for decades. She contracted some horrible illness that she died from over a period of years. He remarried. A few years into that marriage his second wife came down with an illness that took her a few horrible years to die from. He was now married to a lady he had met online. We knew her. She definitely marched to a different tambourine.

I said that with his experiences he must have some insights on marriage. He said, “I’ll tell you this. People sure are different.” A lifetime of experience, summarized in a couple of phrases.

I’m young at heart. I am still an insufferable know-it-all even at my advanced age. There is really no excuse for that. It’s is both a bug and a feature. Buddy, however, was pretty young so he can be excused for thinking he knew something that just wasn’t true.

He went to the last session with the pastor with his wife to be and the best man and the maid of honour. They went through the checklist for tomorrow’s wedding. They got to the wedding license part. Buddy said, “we don’t need a wedding license for a church wedding.” Pastor, “Oh, yes you do. I can’t marry you without a wedding license.”

What to do? The process in California takes more than a day. There just wasn’t time before tomorrow’s event.

Buddy and his fiancé hopped a red-eye flight to Las Vegas and grabbed a cab at the airport. They directed the cabbie to a wedding chapel and directed him to wait for them. Now married, they headed back to the airport and a flight back to San Diego. The bride got back in time to go to her wedding day breakfast with her father. The wedding “ceremony” was held with nobody being the wiser other than the immediate wedding party.

They say, that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, but this secret held for years. Until one day, years later, Buddy’s widowed mother was discussing remarriage plans with the same pastor. “You could always do what your son did.” “Oh? What was that?”

Buddy was a motivation trainer. He claimed that one year he worked with the Miami Dolphins. Leading into the season and all through the season he worked with them on the mantra “we’re going to the Super Bowl!” And it worked! They arrived at the Super Bowl.

They lost.

Then a more effective “What Happened?” analysis than Hillary’s kicked in. They figured out that their goal had been one step short. Once they achieved their goal of getting to the Super Bowl they kinda ran out of steam. The new mantra became “We are going to WIN the Super Bowl!”

They won.

Buddy worked for a company building subway cars in a Montreal suburb when they first got into the business. You probably have contributed to welfare payments sent their way.

They had a subway car under construction and hadn’t worked out the details of the automatic door openers, yet. There were some VIP’s that wanted to see the results so far. One evening buddy and a co-worker lay under the subway car in the factory. When the VIP’s came on their tour Buddy and his co-worker used ropes to open and close the subway car doors as appropriate. Another successful tour accomplished.

One rainy Saturday morning on the coast I drove to an advertised garage sale way out in the country. With the rain and the distance from town I was the only customer there. I poked around looking at stuff and selecting a bit. I opened a box of miscellaneous kitchen stuff and the vendor realized it was a box from their last move that she had never got around to unpacking. Not for sale.

One thing I selected was a section of galvanized furnace ducting. The lady asked what I was going to do with it and I explained I would make rabbit feeders out of it that would hold a week’s worth of food at a time. She asked me how I killed them when butchering day came. I responded that I shot them.

She got all concerned for my safety and wanted more details. I said I put them in a box well away from my hands and used a rifle with a .22 short cartridge to shoot them in the back of the head. She seemed relieved. It appears she had a friend who decided to shoot a largish rabbit with a .22 pistol. The friend grabbed the rabbit in one hand and the pistol in the other. The rabbit struggled. The end result was a gunshot wound to the hand.

A co-worker told me he worked at McDonald’s when he was a teen ager. He said he got into a rhythm making their signature burgers. He hated it when somebody would order a “special grill” which have customer requests like “no ketchup” etc. His response to the break in his work flow was to spit on the hamburger patty. Think about that next time you annoy somebody handling your food.

Buddy lived in Maryland for a number of years before returning to his home country. He told me about a funeral he went to. The client was presented to the funeral home as penniless, homeless and without family in the United States. Whether by law or by custom the funeral home did everything at no charge.

The funeral service was held in the smallest room possible. A crowd of people showed up, made up of friends, supposedly non-existent family and other members of this large ethnic community in Maryland. The partitions had to be moved back to make the room bigger to handle the crowd. The funeral director realized he had been scammed. He looked really annoyed.

When the casket was loaded into the hearse, the hearse took off at full speed and maintained pedal to the metal all the way to the graveyard.

Years later Buddy cannot tell the story of how fast the hearse drove to lose the procession and how annoyed the funeral director looked without laughing almost to the point of tears.

There is a fable about an ant and a grasshopper you may know. The grasshopper plays all summer and is not ready for winter unlike the ant who industriously stored up food.

Buddy was fond of strays, perhaps that is why he befriended me. Maybe, but it’s been decades since I could ask him. One day he picked up a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker (let’s call him HH) said he was going back to his parents in Pennsylvania. Buddy offered to buy him a hamburger. HH said he was a vegetarian, but since he was traveling, he guessed that would be okay.

Over hamburger and fries HH related his tale of woe.

All summer long HH lay in the meadows in the sun playing his guitar. When winter arrived, he had no firewood. One day of cutting firewood gave him enough fuel for three days. Being out of shape from doing nothing all summer meant that he needed to spend those days resting up in bed. By the time he was rested up it was time to cut again. As the winter grew colder, he fell behind and catastrophe struck.

His water bed froze. Time to go home to mommy and daddy. Buddy dropped him at the ferry landing to help him on his journey.

Winters don’t last forever. Spring arrives. Buddy sees HH looking very downcast walking along the street. He pulls over and says he looks a bit down, could he buy him a hamburger. HH guesses that would be okay under the circumstances.

Over hamburger and fries HH explains the source of his despondency. One thing he hadn’t bothered to tell Buddy last winter was he had not played in the sun alone. He had an “old lady” that he had left with the frozen water bed. She had solved the water bed problem by acquiring a new “old man”. When HH arrived back home the disloyal wench and her new old man ran him off. I guess you can’t rely on anybody.

Buddy came to Canada from Germany with his parents when he was about ten years old. They sent him to school in Canada in lederhosen. He said he learned to fight.

We pass a pet/feed each day on our walk to uptown. They have a parakeet cage near the window which reminded me of a story Buddy told me about his buddy who sold parakeets by mail order with a money-back guarantee that they would talk.

He sold thousands at a pretty high price since they were “Guaranteed to Talk”. He bought his stock cheaply from Woolworth’s and other chain stores that sold parakeets at a loss to make money selling cages, feed, etc.

Of course, the birds never talked and people would call his toll-free phone number and ask for their money back. He would say, “No Problem. Just put the bird in a Ziplock bag and mail it back to us. When it arrives, we’ll sent you your money for the bird and postage.” Nobody ever sent one back.

Eventually the feds shut him down, but it was a profitable scam while it lasted.

Buddy sold Lawn Boy lawn mowers at his small engine dealership. He sold one to an elderly widow. She traded in an ancient pull-start Lawn boy for a new electric start model. The old one was in mint condition since she and her husband before her would thoroughly wipe it down after each use. It worked fine, but was getting too much for her to start by pulling the cord. The electric start one would solve that problem. Unfortunately, the electric start mower seized up in a few months.

The lady brought it back to Buddy’s store and he replaced it under warranty and passed on the cost to the manufacturer.

A few months later the warranty replacement mower seized in similar fashion. The lady returned it.

Buddy couldn’t replace it under warranty without the manufacturer getting involved. The manufacturer’s rep claimed that the lady must have failed to use oil in the mower gas for the engines to seize like that. The lady insisted her husband had taught her about adding oil to the gas and she had done it for years on the mower she traded in. The manufacturer’s rep was still pretty skeptical, but Buddy fought for doing the right thing by his customer. They arranged to go to the lady’s house and they asked for a demonstration of how she mixed mower gas.

She got out her measuring cup and measured out some gas. Then she took out her bottle of Crisco cooking oil and measured out the precise amount of cooking oil to add to the gasoline. “Stop, right there!” The problem was solved. The newer mowers had tighter tolerances in their engines than the old one that had survived years of cooking oil. The rep agreed that they would replace the mower under warranty “one last time”. He gave her a case of two-stroke oil with the mower and the insistence that that would be the only type of oil she ever used.

Nowadays you may see “OMG” in text messages. OG is not a contraction of that phrase. When I was twenty-one I spent about a year working selling real estate, first with one firm and then a second. At the second firm was a really old guy in my eyes. He was around my current age at the time of writing this. He didn’t “peddle houses” like the rest of us. He sold water front property. This enabled him to come into the office a bit during the winter to write letters and make phone calls and to travel up and down the coast with clients in the summer as a tax deductible expense. He leased his boat from the shell of a company he had operated. His initials were O.G. and as a hobby he wrote a column in the local newspaper entitled “Oh Gee”. That probably identifies him, but I don’t have anything bad to write about him so hopefully that is okay.

Buddy had started an electrical contractor business in the 50’s in the Southwest United States. He said that when he started he had just a 1947 Coupe with a ladder on the side, no employees and no debt. Ten years later he had ten employees and was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and was considered a big success.

He said his father went into the local Cadillac dealer and asked about the fuel economy of the model on the showroom floor. The salesman mocked him and said that if he had to ask that he couldn’t afford it. His father said “okay” and left the dealership. The other salesman asked the first if he knew the departing would-be client was the richest man in the county. Buddy’s dad drove to the next county and bought a new Cadillac from that dealer.

Buddy’s dad was a widower and getting on in years. He wanted to downsize and had seen a small mobile home with a suitable layout, but he didn’t consider that living in a trailer was suitable for a man of his station in life. He had a small concrete block home built on the back of Buddy’s property. It was the same size and layout as the mobile home.

 The real estate office that we worked from had local house listings and local and regional business listings. Buddy was amused by the retiring customers that came into check out motels that were for sale. He didn’t think that was much of a retirement occupation. He said that he had never worked so hard in his life as when he ran a motel. One of the other tales he had about the motel business was how that when he had gone into it he had four thousand dollars and his partner had a million dollars. He said when he got out of the motel business two years later he had nothing and his partner had a million and four thousand dollars.

Buddy said he knew that he had made seat belt use a habit when one day he arrived at a farm gate. He undid his seat belt and got out of the car. He opened the gate and got back in the car and did up his seat belt. He drove through the gate. He undid his seat belt and got out of the car and closed the gate. He got back into the car, did up his seat belt and drove off.

He lived for years in a town in the Southwest that increased in population tenfold during World War 2. Housing and building materials were at a premium. He said that one fellow owned a couple of lots used to build RTM (ready to move) houses. With ¼” thick sheetrock and 2x2 studs on four foot centers he said they barely held together for the move, but they were all that was available at the time.

He said that in his home town all the bakers would meet to set the price of bread at a level where they could all make money. Then they would trip over each other to be the first back to their bakery to drop it a few cents to try and score sales.

Before he moved to Canada he came by bus to check it out. The route was through Oregon and for several days after leaving home he saw nothing but sage brush and he was starting to get worried since the whole purpose of the move was going to be to get away from sagebrush. But the sagebrush got left behind and he looked at properties and didn’t see anything quite right. He said he bought his first property in Canada, sight unseen, over the phone from a real estate sales person that many people didn’t trust. He said he just discounted everything the salesman said by fifty per cent and it was still okay.

In his later years Buddy decided to have a houseboat built suitable for ocean use. To amuse himself he named it the Bon Nus. People, of course, thought it translated as “Good News” not “Good Nudes” which was his intent. When the houseboat was being built a local fibreglass shop had made a mistake and then charged thousands of dollars labour to correct it. Buddy made sure everybody knew about it and would either avoid them or build protection into any contract with the shop. He said these things in as nice a manner as you could please. He said his practice when cheated was to badmouth the business until he figured he had cost them twice what they had cost him.

Buddy told me of going to work on a start-up in Southeast Asia for two years. Ignoring advice from his boss, he stored a bunch of computers he was experimenting pushing the limits with and some other stuff that he was attached to along with his motorcycle. The storage locker fee was $100 a month. When he returned he sold the motorcycle for $2,400 and threw all the computers and other stuff in the trash. Technology and his interests had marched on.

Buddy says he was in Toronto one time and wanted to get back to Vancouver. He saw an ad in the newspaper for somebody to share the driving. Buddy was almost 20 years old, but he had never learned to drive. The person who wanted someone to share the driving didn’t think to ask him if he knew how to drive.

I asked him what happened when it was his turn to drive. He said, “Well, it became obvious right away that I didn’t know how to drive so the other guy started driving again. Eventually he got so tired he didn’t care anymore and it became my turn. By the time we got to Vancouver I could drive pretty well.”

If you drive up the coast of B.C. on highway 101 you will before too long come to the end of the road and find yourself on a dock looking out over the water at some of the northern outposts of the gulf islands. Behind you on your left is a breakwater and a small harbor with commercial fishing boats and pleasure boats. Behind you on your right is the Lund Hotel with a bar and restaurant and some rooms and a few shops. A few years back you might have encountered one of the commercial fishermen in the bar and he might have told the story of his time opal mining in Australia.

Buddy says that the opals are found in a layer of dirt several feet below the surface. A seeker of opals digs a vertical shaft to the level of the layer and then digs a horizontal tunnel through the relatively soft dirt looking for a lump of hard material which, hopefully, is an opal.

He started small, doing all the digging himself. One day he found a large lump that was an opal. He carried it to town and bought himself a bottle of whiskey and took the lump to an opal cutter. He sat and sipped while the opal cutter tried to cleave the opal. This is the moment of truth. If the opal stays intact it can be quite valuable. If it shatters or crumbles then what remains has hardly any value at all.

The opal remained large during the cutting process. Buddy had money. He had enough to hire two diggers. The diggers dug lateral tunnels while Buddy sat at the bottom of the shaft and listened.

“Thud. Thud. Clunk.”

“Clunk” meant the digger had hit something hard. When he heard a clunk Buddy would scurry down the tunnel the clunk came from. The clunk could be a rock or an opal. He had to get to the end of the tunnel in time to see which it was before the digger stole it from him.

He didn’t claim to have made a fortune, but he grubstaked himself to a commercial fishing boat on Canada’s West Coast. Better than sitting in a hole in the ground in the Outback one supposes.

Buddy went to Australia to see family members who had settled from England there rather than in Canada. While in the Outback a local named Snowy says, “Want to go for a ride?” Off they go in an open, jeep type vehicle. Snowy is steering with one hand and waving a rifle with the other. When he sees a rabbit he shoots it with a one handed shot from the rifle.

The rabbits almost invariably flip over and lie still, killed with a single shot. One doesn’t. It flips over the edge of the road and into a ditch out of sight. Snowy stops the vehicle and goes to where the rabbit was last seen. It is still alive, but wounded. Snowy dispatches it with another shot. “You don’t leave things to die” pronounces Snowy and they carry on.

Buddy asked Snowy how he learned to shoot like that. Snowy said that when he was a boy his father would drive a truck while he and his brother shot rabbits with a shared rifle. If he had the rifle and he missed a rabbit his father would take the rifle away and give it to his brother who got to shoot until he missed a shot.

The above quote appeared the other day in a daily motivational e-mail that arrives from Nightingale-Conant. Although I would most assertively disagree with the basis of many of their offerings, I have benefited from some and am willing to sift. Now that that disclaimer is out of the way back to the matter at hand. The quote reminded me of a Tale of Buddy.

Buddy was a mechanical engineer who took me to dinner one night on behalf of his employer. One of the things we talked about was how he was working for this valve company in Massachusetts and started taking night courses toward an engineering degree. His brother mocked him saying, "That will take ten years!" As Buddy said to me, "It did take ten years, but the ten years would have happened anyway and now I have my degree. My brother has nothing to show for those ten years."

Buddy was driving toward Prince George on the Prince Rupert to Prince George highway in British Columbia one moonless night. He was far from the nearest town with no signs of other traffic. A small plane experiencing mechanical difficulties landed in front of him using Buddy's car's headlights illumination and the highway as a landing strip. A bit of an adrenalin rush one would suppose.

Buddy told me about when he was eighteen or so and he got a job on a Scandinavian freighter working its way down the west coast from Canada and around the tip of South America to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

There were two guys on the ship that were writing a serial article for a men's magazine about their travels down the Pan-American Highway. They were not actually travelling the highway. At each port they would unload their motorcycle and race inland to the highway and take a few pictures and look around and come back and write their next article and send it off. Reminds me of another buddy whose wife wrote multiple stories for a true confessions type magazines. Apparently "true" for them meant it could be true and it could have happened.

But I digress.

Back to Buddy on the ship.

He had some sort of cigarette ration and didn't smoke so he was saving this and adding to his stash anyway he could for resale in Argentina where cigarettes sold for high prices. They arrived in port in Buenos Aires and immediately somebody came aboard and bought all his inventory for an unbelievable price.

This was cause for celebration! Off to a night club with his shipmates!

After a while the police arrived. The night club owner had called them. The bills were doctored. The purchasers of his cigarettes had paid him with bills to which they had glued extra zeroes to increase their numerical face values. The words on the bills did not match their numerical denomination, but the words were in Spanish and he didn't know any better. At the police station he told his story and they greeted it with great delight. He couldn't understand much the police were saying but he did understand the term "estupido." They considered him so garmless that they just confiscated all but one of his phony bills and sent him back to the ship. Years later he showed me his momento as he related his sad but amusing story.

Buddy told about a privately owned refinery he worked at in Alberta, decades ago. He had shown up looking for a job. The owner/manager asked him what an instrument mechanic was and what he could do for the place. After a bit of sales pitch from Buddy he offered Buddy a job for a few months on a trial basis. Buddy accepted.

The railways were getting out of steam locomotives and moving to diesel in those days. The refinery had a number of old steam locomotives they had bought surplus from the railways. This was the "steam plant." The fuel was waste gas from the process. Unlike the natural gas you may burn in your home furmace this waste gas was all over the place in terms of heat value per unit volume. This made the steam output a bit erratic. Buddy rigged up a constant heat value controller using a pilot flame and a thermopile regulating a valve so the waste gas flowing to the locomotive boilers flowed at a variable volume, but a constant flow in terms of heating value. Steam output smoothed out. The owner gave Buddy a raise and said he'd keep him.

The owner/manager was a chemical engineer and had some pretty quirky ways. If a tradesman was caught with an adjustable wrench on site he was fired.

Another quirky, but inherently practical mandate was that each year had its unique color. Everything over hauled or rebuilt in a given year was painted that year's color when it was rebuilt. If it was something fancy like an analyzer then just the flanges would be painted. This sounds strange, but after several years of doing this one could walk through the plant and see the repair history of the place. You knew what had been rebuilt and when and what had never been rebuilt. Pretty simple and effective. It would take a lot of technology and maintenance of that technology and database to have that in a modern plant especially with instant access in the field like that.

The staff was provided housing. Each house had a garbage burning pit out back. You threw you rgarbage in, turned the manual gas valve and threw in a match to incinerate the household garbage. Pretty nifty. Mind you it was sour gas - natural gas with a high percentage of H₂S (Hydrogen Sulphide). H₂S is highly toxic and has all sorts of environmental and safety regulations and safety controls to deal with it these days. Not something you would find somebody burning in their back yard.

One day the refinery received a call from a neighbor about a mile away. They had recently moved in and had a concern. There was a tap on the wall in their garage and when they opened it gasoline came out. The line was traced back to a gasoline storage tank in the refinery. Judging by the condition of the line and the ground it was buried in it had been in place for many years and for many prior occupants of the house. I guess none of them thought it was a problem that they had a tap in their garage from which they could fill a jerry can.

The refinery owner had indiosyncratic hobbies as well. He became fatally involved with his hobby of glacier walking in the Rockies one day when he fell into a hidden crevsase. A nephew took over the operation. He was as hands-on a manager as his uncle but without the underlying competence. Not enamored of being whipped into shape Buddy wandered away. So did other employees. So did profits. The place was sold to a major oil company and eventually closed down.

It was almost lunchtime. Buddy says to me, "It's lunchtime. I gotta go feed the dog! I hate feeding the dog!"

I responded, "Whose dog is it?"

"The kids'."

"Why do you feed it?"

"Because it would starve."

"So? Whose dog is it?"

After a brief pause, "Yeah. You're right"

Buddy never fed the dog again. A couple of weeks later I asked him how it was going. He said the kids were a little irritable because the dog tended to become a bit agressive when it wasn't fed, but otherwise things were going okay.

Buddy moved a few days' drive away. Two years later I dropped in and visited him. I noticed the dog and the dog dish on the sundeck and asked how that was going. He said he had never fed the dog again and every so often looked out at the dish and thought of me.

Shows the influence of a well placed question from somebody reading Flight of the Buffalo.