What's All This Bullsh*t Going Down?

In the early ,1990s, the Rationalist found himself so under employed that he was flat broke most of the time.
The construction industry, the mainstay of my 'career', if you could dignify what I do with that term, had tanked due to, well, whatever it is which causes booms and busts.
Your's truly had to find a job - something not to my liking at all.
I finally landed an interview with a gas company for a job reading gas meters.
I thought this might be okay since I was hiking every weekend at the time and figured I would enjoy an outdoor job with a lot of walking around.

I took an interesting series of both multiple choice and mechanical tests and, as usual, got high marks.
Next came the all important urine test. For those of you who have not applied for a working man's job in donkey's years, if ever, these are mandatory for any job which the employee even looks at a device which could be construed as being part of interstate transportation.
Many companies require them even when the government does not.

One doesn't walk into the testing place casually either.
I was told repeatedly that I had better be able to urinate in the short time allowed or no job.
The're not just testing for drug use either; the nurse dipped a piece of card with a bunch of colored swatches - I thought maybe I had gone to a paint store by mistake - on it into the urine to test for a whole bunch of things.

After the preliminaries were over, I had to bring in my high school diploma and my passport so they could be photocopied.
I felt as though I was applying to the C.I.A.
Then there was over a week of classes and a probationary period. I had to pay union dues from the first day even though neither I nor any of the other trainees was covered by the union contract until after 6 months of work.
Yeah, the labor movement is really helping the working man.

Who would have thought that a process such as meter reading could be made into such a challenge.
The meters had dials, some of which ran clockwise and others of which ran counter clockwise.
This made learning to read them accurately much more difficult than ordinary counters.
There were numerous kinds of meters in all different conditions and locations.
Look in your basement sometime, then look at some of the weirdos you see on the street, and then imagine what their basements are like.
That's what I had to deal with hundreds of times a day.

I was actually told to urinate in customer's basements rather than take the time or the risk of offending them by asking to use their bath rooms.
It was impossible to read all of the 600 meters on a normal route, but no one would say that.
Instead, what would happen was that the locations with several meters, apartment houses typically, would be certain to be read, while private houses would frequently be skipped.
Sometimes we just quietly put tags on the person's doors claiming we had come when he or she was out and so the reading would have to be estimated; and then we sneaked away.

This led to me repeated confronting old persons who insisted they had been there all day waiting for 'me' to show up last time.
They would be practically soiling themselves what with postponing a trip to the toilet just so they wouldn't miss the meter man.
I didn't like doing this, so I desperately tried to read all the meters on my route.
Alas, I fell short every time.

The meter readings had to be entered into a hand held computer the size and weight of an old fashioned walkie talkie.
This device was supposed to streamline the process of recording by having the entire route programmed in advance.
The problem was that it was most unusual to actually read the meters in the order specified for the reason given above as well as the many businesses which were opened after they would normally be encountered on our routes, and many other reasons.
The computer could be operated to deal with all these things, but not intuitively and not quickly.

The kind of persons who could keep their minds on this small, but necessary group of skills were neither interesting nor friendly.
They reminded me of cops, but duller, much duller.
They affected the kind of comraderie which the terrorist in blue are famous for, but the job was too ill paid, too transient (110% annual turnover!), and too insecure for such spirit to be anything but false - especially for new comers.

The job was also dangerous. I never took a fall, but injuries and hospitalizations were numerous.
Dogs were an ever present threat, as were low hanging pipes, rats, and belligerent customers.

As you can tell, this job sucked the hairy meat of a cockroach.
It had but one positive aspect.
I got to see how all kinds of people I were living.
Persons I would never meet in social settings had to let me into the under pants of their homes, so to speak.

From Cobble Hill to Bedford-Stuyvesand, from million dollar homes to illegal sub-cellar squats, I saw it all.
I went into homes where I was invited to tea and I went into homes where I had to keep swatting the flies (it was winter, mind you) away from my face just to see the meter.
I beheld a true cross section of Brooklyn society and, you know what?
I felt truly glad to be me and to have what little I had because it could be soooo much worse!

I finally had to quit the job.
I just couldn't figure out how to pretend to read 600 meters a day and then read the ones I was supposed to read.
I guess I was just too old to learn new tricks.

My original reason for writing this essay, though, is that I learned something very interesting about the natural gas industry in the training class.
Brooklyn Union Gas loses about 1/7th of it's gas between the gas and oil fields and your gas appliance.
That's a lot of gas and it doesn't even take into account what's happening at the wells themselves.

Why is this important?
Well, what most of us under 50 don't know is that this country's gas powered machinery originally ran on producer gas.
This was a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen which was produced by passing steam over burning coal.
One may still read old books or, as I have, see old cartoons referring to the 'gas house boys'.
These were the tough men who worked at the enormous producer gas works which were at the edge of every good sized American city for decades.

By the 1,960s, as nearly as I can make out, almost the entire country had converted to natural gas.
Natural gas come out of deep earth wells and is usually found together with petroleum.
For a long time most of it was simply burned off to get rid of it, but most of it is now captured and pumped to homes and businesses.

Now comes the good part.
Scientists who are concerned with global warming have been pointing for a number of years to the dramatic increase in the amount of methane in the atmosphere.
Methane levels are important because methane is a green house gas.
That means it helps to keep the infra red rays emitted by the cooling earth at night in the atmosphere rather than letting them radiate away to space.
Water vapor and carbon dioxide are also green house gasses.

I don't remember the figures, but I seem to recall that methane levels have gone up 50% in this century.
The cause of this is not known but is believed to be cause by increases in the number of cattle being raised.
When cattle poop rots, it gives off methane. Methane is also the main constituant of natural gas.
So, if what I heard at Brooklyn Union is true, though, the better explanation might be that the expansion of natural gas drilling, storage, and pipelines with the attendant losses at each stage is the culprit for the rise in atmospheric methane.

After I quit meter reading, I did odd jobs and just scraped by until times improved in my industry.
I never forgot how many of the rest of us are living and I never forgot how happy it is to not have a working man's job - especially when it involves gas.

Date?

"Woman in Bath " by Joan Hardin (copyright)

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