JOBS THRU THE YEARS: Navy Shipyard Ship Shaper-Upper

there’s a thousand jobs out there . . . and there’s a thousand i don’t want . . .

As bleak job searches go, the dismal year of 1987 was particularly desperate. A friend got wind of a Korean company called YYK Enterprises whose lucrative business provided “preservation, blast and paint services for commercial clients, MSC, NOAA, the US Navy, and the US Coast Guard.”

According to the YYK website, they worked on everything from ships, barges, cutters, water tanks and cranes, to wastewater treatment plants, and chemical and fuel storage facilities.

Wow! Sounds like an ideal fit for me — the artist, boho-slacker nature boy!

When my buddy, equally desperate for “gainful employment”, told me they were hiring with an unheard of starting wage of $17 an hour, we immediately headed across the Bay Bridge to the San Francisco-based shipyard office of YYK and applied.

To our surprise, a gruff no-nonsense man hired us on the spot and insisted we start right now!

We provided some excuse or another and were able to begin the next morning. We didn’t even know what we’d be doing, other than “servicing ships”.

Which, as we soon learned, turned out to be a nasty little job called “hole duty”, where we spent most of an eight-hour shift down in the bowels of a Navy ship’s ballast tanks hosing down oil residue using a high powered spray blaster hooked up to an ear-splitting generator whose shrieking decibels were amplified tenfold by the monstrous reverberations of a deafening echo throughout the reeking stench of the chamber hull.

A more appropriate description would have been “hellhole duty”!

Within a few minutes of operating the gigantic, unwieldy hose, we were drenched to the bone. We were given no earplugs nor any sort of protective water gear.

Finally, unable to stand the miserable conditions, I complained to our non-sympathetic supervisor that, hey, c’mon, we needed rain suits and earplugs, for cryin’ out loud!

Both items were begrudgingly supplied the next day, but neither were of good quality, with the rain suit shredding and the ear plugs as useless as drugstore ersatz varieties.

This job required industrial-strength equipment . . . and manly doses of gumption and grit, let me tell you — all in short supply!

At the end of two miserable shifts, I had severe reservations about returning for another day in the hellhole. But who could pass up seventeen bucks an hour, right.

The next morning, some honchos pulled my buddy aside as we were death marching to the hole with a five man crew, and told him they were reassigning him to “topside” duties.

Was I ever steamed!

I held out until lunch hour, then clocked out and vanished to never return. My stint in the hellhole belly of the ballast tanks beast marked a low point (literally!) in my litany of jobs thru the years. But I was thankful and optimistic that I had no place to go from there but up (literally!).

And I learned a life-long lesson that oily to bed and oily to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise . . . is all a bunch of big-fat-lies!