Life of Nobody

[Adios]

Owning a bar in cowboy country presents some unique challenges from time to time. It's never boring and the bartender/owner has to keep his eyes moving all the time.

The place was always rocking on the weekends, I mean past capacity packed. One night I looked up and saw a horses head coming in the front door. I went over the bar and grabbed the bridle to stop the horse. The rider was drunk and laughing and started spurring the horse. I kept a good grip on the bridle and was screaming at the cowboy.

Finally I got him to listen. Then I explained there was a basement under the bar and the building was 100 years old and the horse might fall through the floor. Of course everybody in the bar was cheering him to ride on in.

Even I was laughing by this time. I finally got the horse backed out of the doorway and told the cowboy he could tie the horse up and come on in if he wanted.

He wasn't through riding yet so he started riding off. The horse got in the middle of Highway 86 and stalled. The rider was too drunk to do anything about it. I was ready to go lead the horse back to the parking lot when the cops showed up and told me they would handle it.

The way they handled it was to give the cowboy a DUI and take him to jail. One of his friends went out and took charge of the horse so the cops wouldn't impound it. He fought the DUI in court and lost. Even though he wasn't on a motorized vehicle the charge stuck that he wasn't in control of his vehicle.

He was very proud of that DUI.

[Adios]

Meh. Disregard that last story. I am not ready to go into that phase of my life yet and the story reads like it was forced and will not be included in the book.

[LMNO]

funny, though.  Will wait for the correct tale.

[Adios]

Heh, I just wanted my muse to show up. Didn't work.

There are plenty of stories from those days but the timing just isn't right yet. It will come.

[Juana]

Still like the story and I can more than kind of picture that.

In the 90's. I used to own the Running Creek Grill.

Cool.  I'm from the Bear Creek area, so I was curious.

[Adios]

During our lives we often come to a place that is a major decision whether we know it at the time or not. I needed a job so I applied at 2 places. One was the Denver County Sheriffs department and the other was as  a maintenance mechanic with a major corporation.

I had passed all the exams and was offered a job with the sheriffs department and was seriously considering it. The only downfall was it was as a jail guard for the first 2 years.

I also received an offer on the maintenance mechanic job which was to maintain and repair all equipment in a 750,000 square foot building.

The pay was even between the 2 jobs so it was a tough decision. I finally went with the mechanic job and I guess it wasn't a bad decision because I stayed there for 25 years. I will get retirement from it in a few years and made some lifelong friends.

One was my boss, Vince. He was like a father to me and I loved that man. He took a snot nosed kid and turned me into a man. We would go over to his house and he made some damn good wine that he would share. In my 25 years on that job the turnover was incredibly low, only about 6 people ever left.

Any time I think about Vince and all that he ever did for me I can't help but remember the day he died. Vince was involved in his community from Future Leaders of America to being a Mason. It was a week before Christmas and he was delivering care packages for the needy.

He did this every year. It's just a part of who he was. It had snowed the day before and there was ice on the road and another driver lost control and crashed into Vince. He would have survived the accident except he had a heart attack that killed him.

Several of us who worked for him were in tears. We had all lost someone very special who had impacted our lives positively for over 20 years. We lost a member of our family.

Now I don't pretend to know what happens to us after we die but I do know that as long as the rest of us live and remember Vince he will also live, in our hearts and minds. Sometimes as I consider doing a thing I can still hear his voice, teaching me, leading and guiding me. I hope the other guys still remember him in the same way.

The world needs more men like Vince.

[Adios]

There was one guy that really didn't fit in with the rest of us, no matter how we tried. Vinces' ideas weren't even working well.

So one day several of us grabbed Bob and we taped and tied him to a rescue body basket. It took all of us, I'll give Bob that, for a scrawny guy he put up a pretty good fight.

Well once we had him secure we tied the basket with him in it to some pipes overhead in the boiler room right by the entrance. We did this during lunch and when Vince came back from lunch he looked up and said "Hi Bob" and he just walked to his office.

Vinces' boss came down about 15 minutes later and looked up without saying anything, met with Vince for a while and then left.

For those of you who have never worked around maintenance engineers let me tell you, we have a way of taking care of out own issues. It was only questioned if someone got hurt. Well, hurt badly.  We left Bob up there about 6 hours and finally Vince had us let him down.

Another day we tied Bob to a 2 wheel hand truck and gagged him and put him on the freight elevator. I never did find out who finally let him loose, but I do know he was on that elevator about 3 hours. Bob was a lot of fun. Sad though, he never did really catch on.

We wouldn't allow him to remove his boots in the locker room either. I have never smelled feet like that in my entire life. The stench would penetrate the entire locker room and run everybody out. He had a special place to take his boots off and leave them and no one ever bothered them either.

Bob finally moved on and I hope he found a place where he fit in, he really wasn't a bad guy.

[Adios]

We had to treat the reflecting pools with algaecide often to keep them clean. We did this from the filtration system down in the boiler room. We would just add a blue chemical and it would get pumped into the pool and you could stand there and watch this blue cloud spread over the entire pool in minutes.

This wasn't a small pool as it contains 1 acre feet of water and was 1 foot deep. In other words the pool was one acre.

One day a guy from the custodial crew was taking his lunch at the same time we were adding the chemical. We knew this because we had to go up and watch and make sure no one got in the water until the chemical had dispersed.

Well this guy had just walked out when the chemical was coming out and he fell to his knees and started praying. Every day after that no matter what the weather he would go out there to pray and have his lunch.

Of course being maintenance engineers we would in no way take advantage of this and we never planned adding the chemical at a specific time of day. Don't you believe me? Well, I don't blame you.

After that day we always had a lookout with a 2 way radio to let us know when to add the chemical. Even the rest of the custodial crew knew what we were doing and nobody ever told the guy. After a while even we didn't have the heart to tell him.

We were always up to things like this.

[Adios]

Grannys House



Packing house and barn



View from front porch

[Adios]

Me in my bar in Colorado. Some of the grandkids are sitting at the bar.




17 years old.

[Adios]

One day Bill and me were walking through the boiler room and suddenly he started falling and said "I'm Hit!". We were right in front of the window of Vince's office so I grabbed him to keep him on his feet until we got out of sight.

Bill was quite a bit bigger than me but we made it to safety anyway. He pulled his shirt up and there was a huge red mark on his side. We had no idea what had happened but once I got him sitting down I went to find out.

It seems some of the guys had made an air rifle that shot a rubber plug. It worked. Very well. We ran house pneumatics at 150PSI so it packed a pretty good punch too. I forgot about Bill and we started playing around with the rifle and were beginning to think that hitting Bill was just luck. The darn thing just wasn't that accurate.

We did manage to hit a few things though so we kept making modifications and trying it.

We had just made a pretty hefty modification when Paul walked in the boiler room. Somebody said "Shoot Paul." so we did. Now Paul was about 75 feet away and the odds of hitting him were none. Except we nailed him dead in the chest. He went down like a rag doll and we stripped that rifle apart in seconds and disappeared.

Paul laid there quite a while but he was alright. Bill and Paul found out what happened later when we were filling out our daily logs.

There was no mention of the air rifle in any of our logs

[Adios]

Bill H and myself were usually at the bottom of any pranking going on but everybody had some pranks at one time or another.

Jim was a friend of ours and that was never a safe thing to be. There was a shortcut through the old Ken Caryl cattle ranch that those of us with keys could use. One day Bill and I had left ahead of Jim and we parked Bills' truck out of sight and we laid down in the ditch beside the road. It was just a small dirt road so nobody ever went fast.

As Jim drove by we jumped out of the ditch and started pound on the side of Jims' van and yelling. Well we scared the devil out of him. It was so much we got away with it 3 more times before Jim got wise to us.

So we planned. One day about 20 minutes before quitting time I went out and popped the lock on Jims' van and went inside and hid. Bill and Jim walked out together and I could hear Jim telling Bill to not scare him on the ranch road. Bill was all innocent and told Jim he wouldn't and as a matter of fact he would follow Jim. This was part of the plan as Bill was my ride.

Well I let Jim get on the ranch road and came out of hiding and started sneaking forward. My original plan was to reach around him and just grab the steering wheel without saying a word, but after thinking it out that would put me in punching range. So I managed to get right behind the drivers seat and then I screamed as loud as I could.

Jim hit the brakes (bending the brake pedal arm) and the van slid to a sideways stop. I was laying on the floor trying to get out of the van before Jim shot me, but I was laughing too hard to move much. Bill pulled up beside Jim laughing as hard as I was.

Then we got worried. Jim was sitting sideways in the drivers seat leaning against the door. His eyes were real wide and he wasn't moving or saying anything. He sat like that a long time.

Finally he blinked and caught his breath and started cussing. Then it got funny all over again.

By now I am out of the van and in a relatively safe position behind Bills' truck just in case Jim did decide to shoot me. I shouldn't have worried because Jim was shaking too bad to aim.

He bought us lunch the next day.

But we weren't quite through with Jim yet.

[Adios]

im and I were in charge of maintaining the fire and safety computer that helped run the building. I mean down to component level. We had 3 large cabinets set up that we kept parts locked up in.


We had been expecting a shipment of electronic components for a few days and they finally came in. Jim wasn't at work yet so I was going to put them away and I got a better idea. I found Bill H.

We took everything out of the cabinet and put it all in another place and then removed the shelves from the cabinet. Now this cabinet had a steel bar that swung into place to padlock the cabinet in place and here is how much Bill trusted me.

He got inside the cabinet just before it was time for Jim to come in and I locked him in there. Jim came in and I told him the parts came in and he was like a kid in a candy store. We walked back to the cabinet together, and just before we got there I said in a loud voice that I forgot something and I would be right back, for him to go ahead and unlock it.

He did. As the doors were starting to open Bill hit them and popped out of the cabinet yelling and poor Jim started falling backwards until he was flat on the floor. He was holding his chest and looked real pale.

Bill and I were on the floor laughing with tears in out eyes.

Jim bought us lunch that day too.

[Adios]

Bill S was the boiler room man at this time. We had 2 100 ton chillers for cooling, 2 gas boilers and 3 electric boilers for steam, hot water and heating.

Now these were not little by any means. All of them took up a lot of floor space and could be dangerous.

I saw Bill kneeling down in front of the fire chamber sight glass one day working on the ignitor. Since I was the electrician I went over and asked him if he needed any help. He told me he was fine, just a minor issue with the ignitor. I told him to be careful and went back to checking the 40 fuses on one of the electric boilers.

Once in a while I would step back and check on Bill to make sure he was alright. I didn't want the boiler to blow up because we would have drowned before we could have gotten out of the boiler room. We were only running 12 pounds of steam but it still would have drowned us in a blink.

I was buttoning the fuse panel back up when I noticed Bill had a real strange look on his face. Then he just fell over sideways and laid there not moving. I got the giggles because I knew what had happened. He had got the ignitor working and  before he put it back in the fire chamber it fired.

Bill got to know what 10,000 volts felt like that day. There was only a milliamp of current but the voltage alone was enough to knock a grown man down. I turned the power off and replaced the ignitor and then help Bill as much as I could considering how hard I was laughing.

Experience is a merciless teacher.

[Adios]

We had a huge incandescent light dimming system that controlled 100 lights in the main lobby and one day it decided to stop working.

I was the electrician so off I went to fix it. Now this panel was about 7 feet tall and full of components and voltage from top to bottom. I had the panel open and was on a ladder near the top trouble shooting.

All of my screwdrivers had insulated grips and shanks to prevent shock and shorts. Except the one I needed this day. I was pretty sure by now the problem was just a loose connection and I was getting ready to tighten it. No big deal right?

Then the screwdriver slipped from my hand. I was at the top of this big panel and I swear that screwdriver hit every single connection on the way down. I read that an electrical arc is 7 times brighter than the surface of the sun. I don't know for sure but I do know I was blind.

Totally blind and in an electrical closet with the door closed and locked. I was on a ladder in front of an open electrical panel. My eyes were burning like crazy. I was about a whisker away from full blown panic. So I made it off of the ladder real quick and hit the door with my face. Then I bounced off of it twice more before I realized it opened in and not out.

So I made it out of the closet to the main lobby of a major corporation totally blind, calling for help with my hands out in front of me so I wouldn't run into anything. The guards at the desk saw me and ran over to help me while one called the nurse.

At the hospital they told me eyes were sunburned and it would be a few days before I could see again.

Ever since I have had to wear glasses.

But a week later I got that damn dimmer fixed for good. It was just a loose connection.