The Control Room of Hell

NOTE: This blog was originally posted to Xanga.com on March 1, 2003, close to a decade ago. I'm re-posting it here today in honor of my dad's seventy-second birthday.


How close have you stood to Armageddon?

I'm now convinced that children always take their parents for granted, failing to appreciate the many trials, travails and hardships their parents go through to support them. It's human nature I suppose, not being able to truly appreciate someone else's circumstances, someone else's sacrifices, without having shared the same (or at least similar) experiences.

I must've been around eight years old when my dad first got the job at the glass plant. Up until then, from the time he was twelve years old, he'd worked for the local newspaper, The Stockton Record. Back then, The Stockton Record (now simply called The Record) was a family-owned business that, like many other family-owned businesses, looked on their employees as "family". And one shouldn't be expected to pay other family members all that much for a days work, right? After all, there were all those other intangibles that came along with being a part of the family, such as sharing the load, respecting your elders, exchanging gifts during the holidays and such. So it's not hard to imagine how "the family" at The Stockton Record felt when they heard about a certain plus-twenty year employee's communications with an institution called "a union".

Suffice it to say that my father found himself out of work after two decades of employment, with a wife, two kids, and no money coming in. Which, to illustrate my point about children failing to appreciate the trials and travails of their parents, was a situation my sister and I loved! For, while my father was forced to work up to three jobs at a time, including a graveyard shift driving a cab around Stockton, California, in the middle of the night (I hope I didn't scare too many people there), one of his jobs was just oh, so cool. During the afternoon and early evening (swing shift), he worked at a pizza parlor called "Boyces". Believe it or not, my sister and I had never even tasted pizza up until then, and it just so happened that, when a pizza (or two... or three) got burnt and they couldn't sell it to a customer, dad got to bring those burnt pizzas home! Yum!! While it may have been one of the lowest points in my father's life, his children sure appreciated the "silver lining".

Eventually dad landed a job at a local glass plant, where he ended up working (with the exception of a painful layoff period that lasted a year or two) for over thirty years, up until his recent retirement. Once again though, his sacrifices went unappreciated by his children for many, many years. I can remember feeling resentment for the most part, because he was either working too many hours of overtime (a seventy hour week wasn't all that unusual), or working swing shift, where he left before we awoke and got home after we were asleep. For years growing up, a "traditional family dinner" was an oddity reserved for Sunday evenings, elementary and junior high school concerts were attended by only our mother, and family outings with cousins and aunts were occasionally missing the head of our own family.

As an atypical teenager, I appreciated none of this. The stories of working in an "incredibly hot" factory were probably just exaggerations, as were the descriptions of the working conditions. I mean, everyone exaggerates, right?

Years went by, decades even, while my dad continued to work in that glass plant. I graduated from high school, junior college, college, got married, became a father myself, and still he worked in that mysterious place he complained and exaggerated about all the while I was growing up. Then one day, only five or six years ago, I was granted the opportunity, the gift, to step into Hell itself with my father.

I'd recently taken a new job with a technology company (who I still work for), and received a call to go out to a local glass factory to help with the roll-out of new laptop computers, a rollout that had gone completely awry. As it turned out, the glass company my dad worked for had a support contract with my new employer... Which is why, one bright, crisp spring morning in California's Central Valley, I found myself driving up to the gates of the plant my father had worked at (and still worked at) most of the years I was growing up.

Though I spent most of my time in the nicely air-conditioned office areas, where the managers in their suits and ties worked (and the computers I was hired to work on mostly resided), I also got to spend some time "on the floor" (i.e. the production floor of the plant), where the bending and fitting of windshields occurred, inventory was warehoused, equipment and machinery were maintained... Basically where most of the day-to-day work occurred. I also got to spend some time working in the nicely air-conditioned offices of engineers near "the float"... Or (perhaps more accurately) near 'the gates of Hell'.

Most people, myself included, spend their entire lives using products they have no firsthand experience as to the creation of. For example, up until that point in my life, I'd never seen how "flat glass" – the architectural glass used in buildings – was made, or how the "shield glass" used in automotive windshields was created. Oh sure, I new the odd bits about melted sand, silica, that most people know, but not the gritty, uncomfortable and [potentially]dangerous details that the people who make such glass live with every day.

For example, "the float", an unbroken ribbon of glass over a quarter of a mile long, actually "floats" on a river of molten metal, of liquid tin. Remember the last time you opened a tin can, possibly one holding canned fish or fruit? Can you imagine how hot it might be if it were molten? I know I never could, at least not until I actually saw it in person. One of the reasons the float was so long was to allow for the gradual cooling of the molten glass. Towards its end, where the glass was only hot enough to perhaps burn away your hand (e.g. instead of your entire arm or body), the clear ribbon actually moved along on metal rollers. And, because the float had to run continuously (else it would take literally weeks to get the process going again), if there wasn't an immediate need for the glass, the end of the float would lower, causing huge sheets of glass to come crashing down, only to be pushed all the way back under the float, under that river of molten liquid metal, to the furnace where it then could be re-mixed and melted once again.

I can remember standing there, near (though not too near) an "access point", a small little door made of heavily insulated steel and surrounded by firebricks, used for maintenance. The heat coming from the viewing port of that little door was unbelievably intense, as was the incredibly bright red molten material visible beyond. I half expected a little man with pointed horns and a pitchfork to caper out onto the red molten liquid and thrust his ancient weapon in my direction. Then I remembered the stories my own father had told as I was growing up, all the complaints and exaggerations, about working near (or even underneath), something called "the float" (dad worked in plant maintenance); About how incredibly hot it could get in the plant, especially on days where the temperatures in California's Central Valley exceeded one hundred degrees.

Standing there next to that float, sweating after only a few minutes and wincing from that Hell that could've instantly incinerated me if it weren't for less than a foot of protective material, I understood... As a father myself, a husband, a college graduate, a white-collar worker, whatever, I understood... All those stories suddenly had meaning, impact, and I could feel their truth trickling off my brow.

Before I finished up that job, I got to spend time in my dad's office in the truck shop, where he worked most of the time. I even got a lift from him once, from one end of the plant to another, on a little electric cart he had (boy, was that a wild ride!). Eventually, I also got to work in the control room, possibly the most interesting part of the entire factory. Sitting immediately underneath the main furnace, at the beginning/"head" of the float, the control room was where the entire process was monitored, adjusted, and maintained. Engineers with college degrees walked hot, concrete pathways to that room, the heat near the entry doors almost unbearable. Then they entered and found themselves in a cool, air-conditioned, white-walled room, filled with controls, gauges, computers, and other monitoring or control equipment. A simple mistake in that room, a dial turned a little too far, or the wrong set of numbers entered incorrectly, could affect hundreds of fellow human beings working outside of that heavily protected "white room". Just one simple mistake...

Thinking back to that control room, I now wonder... Perhaps we adults are no more appreciative of others than our children are of us? For I can think of other examples, other "white rooms", where a single action could result in catastrophic consequences to others. And, as was the case in that glass plant, the people "turning the dials" in those other "white rooms" often haven't experienced what their fellow human beings have, out there "in harms way", next to the "float", next to Hell on Earth. Would a little empathy help improve the decisions of our world's many "engineers", sitting in their cool, safe "white rooms"?

To be honest, I couldn't even hazard a guess. I will say this, though... Thanks, Dad. Thanks for the sacrifices, the hard work, the endless days. Thanks for "dancing with the devil at the gates of Hell" for your family. Thanks for everything.