Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove down to that gate, and asked the guard at the shack to call the plant manager out, because I was not going to go in and I was not going to sit at home either.
What I had under my arm was a cardboard tube with three chart papers in it.
Here is what a twenty-nine-year-old with six weeks in a plant does not know. That building has two low-pressure boilers, and West Virginia says a boiler that size does not run overnight without a licensed operator on the property, and the license on the wall in that boiler room is mine. I sat for it in 1998 and I have renewed it seven times on my own money.
It is not a security job with a boiler thrown in. It is a boiler job with a flashlight thrown in.
Every hour on the hour I take readings, and I initial the log, and the pressure recorder draws a line on a circular chart that turns once a day with the date written on it in grease pencil. It is a piece of paper with a pen scratching on it, the same as it was in 1962, and you cannot argue with it and you cannot back-date it.
The petty cash box is in the front office. He said the money went between two and three.
My initials are on the log at 2:00 and 3:00. Between them, the chart shows a feedwater swing at 2:14 that took me thirty minutes on my knees at that boiler with a wrench, and there is a note in my hand in the margin about the check valve, which I had also written up twice before.
The plant manager came out to the gate in his coat. He is sixty-one and he has known me since he was a foreman.
I unrolled the chart on the hood of my truck and he stood there in the cold and looked at it for a long time.
Then he asked me the question the young man never asked, which was who is going to be licensed on the property tonight.
Nobody. There was nobody. They had walked their only operator out on a Tuesday and had run that plant two nights uninsured and outside the law without one person in the building noticing, because the man who noticed things had been told to sign a resignation.
They put me back that same afternoon with my years whole and the week paid. The insurance carrier found out anyway and there was a review, and I sat in it and told the truth, which is that the young man did not know, and that nobody had taught him.
He stayed on. He came out to the boiler room the next week and asked me to show him what a chart is, and he wrote things down, and he has not called anybody old man since.
The banquet was that Friday. I went, in the good shirt, and they gave me a clock.
The chart from that night is rolled up in the tube on my shelf. A man ought to be able to show a line and say, that was me, at two-fourteen in the morning.