But the next morning I got up, put on my one good shirt, and drove to the plant before the sun. Not to beg. I went to look that thirty year old manager in the eye one more time, and to let him find out for himself what forty-three years on that floor was worth.
We do not need some throwback from the eighties, it is time for fresh blood, he had said, in front of the whole floor.
He would not hear it. Waved me off. So I went home and I waited, because there was one thing that boy did not know. There was a press on that line, an old cranky machine that had been there almost as long as I had, and I was the only man left in the building who knew how to run it and coax it and keep it alive.
It took about a month. The old press went down, the way it always eventually did, and not one of the fresh-blood kids had the first idea how to bring it back. They called the manufacturer. The manufacturer said the machine was too old, parts long gone, and quoted a price and a wait that would have shut the line down for months.
The line stopped. Every day it sat cost the company more than they had saved cutting all us gray hairs put together. And there was only one name anybody could think of who had ever kept that press running.
They called me. This time the young manager was standing behind the plant boss, real quiet. They asked me to come back and get the press going, and to stay on and run it, at more than I had made in years.
I got it running in an afternoon, the way I had a hundred times, with a feel you only get from forty-three years of listening to a machine tell you what it needs. And I told them I would stay, on one condition. That I could teach the young ones the old machines, the ones no manual covers anymore, so the whole floor would not go dark the next time a throwback from the eighties was not there to save it.
Fresh blood, he called it. But forty-three years of my blood was already in that floor, and it turned out the fresh kind could not run the machine that kept the lights on.
The young ones do not call me old man like it is a joke anymore. They call me over when a machine acts up, and they watch my hands, and they learn. I am three years from a full pension, and I mean to spend those three years making sure that when I finally walk out for good, this floor still knows how to run itself.