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[...] At work, all I thought about was this escape route. I kept notebooks on how to do it; grow organic vegetables, round up work as a painting contractor, rob banks, buy my own welding equipment and start my own business, scuba dive near Yellow Banks in the Ohio River and find the lost Confederat…

The meeting in the park was straightforward and no snipers appeared, if snipers can ever be said to appear. We talked about the safety violations occurring all across the shipyard, those that occurred because the company wasn’t enforcing safety regulations and those that occurred because the compan…

Our instructor nodded then gave us a lecture about work ethics, on-the-job safety, being concerned about the company “as if we owned it,” and how that job had good benefits and there were a lot of other guys out there ready to fill our shoes if we decided we didn’t want to work. There’s a scrap of …

I fantasized about butchering my bosses, getting them in a headlock and slitting their throats and bleeding them out like hogs, but that anger ate me up and I didn’t want to spend time in a state prison or death row due to one of those no-accounts so I took a new approach. My last set of lousy jobs…

In the shipyard, you could easily distinguish the foremen from the workers. The foremen wore white hardhats and the workers – the welders, steel fitters, riggers, pipefitters, carpenters and painters – wore red-orange hats coated with black dust. The foremen wore clean clothing while we workers wor…