My Career as a Boomer, Part One

It's time, folks, for a little confession. Rick has been guilty of living an "alternative lifestyle." No, no, not that!

I'm talking about my short career as a "Boomer." A boomer, as you probably don't know, is a skilled craftsman (pipefitter, electrician, sheet metal worker, instrument tech, etc.) who travels gypsy-like across the nation following construction booms. The holy grail of the boomer is the big power house, high-rise hotel, or manufacturing plant that needs a lot of hands and is paying overtime wages. If you're lucky you might hit a long-term job working 6 - 10s with the occasional double-bubble Sunday as icing on the cake. If you hit one of those just right, you can gross a six figure income in a year...but that's rare.

The more usual outcome is a series of short jobs lasting weeks or maybe a month or so, with timeouts for traveling between jobs. Sometimes you just have to wait - no work, no income, a lot of unease. When you finally find a job, you have to wait another week to 10 days for that first precious check. You'll just be barely breaking even, after sending money home. "I'm here to make money, not spend it!" is the motto of the boomer, so a Spartan lifestyle is de rigueur. If your afraid of fleabag motels and transient hotels in the heart of the crack district, stay at home.

My boomer career began modestly enough with a visit to the IBEW Local 520 in Austin (January of '07 ), just a short jaunt from my home local in San Antonio. Austin, at that time, was a thriving hub of the semi-conductor industry, and demand for skilled craftsmen was high. As an added bonus, it was within commuting distance...if you call a three hour round trip drive "commuting."

My first job was at a Cisco Systems server farm in the upscale Jollyville suburb of Austin. Great bunch of guys and nice clean work, but a slim forty hour check hardly justified the commuting expense. After two months, I ditched Cisco for the big time: the Samsung chip fabrication facility in NW Austin. Fisk Electric was hiring 400+ electricians for a multi-billion dollar expansion of Samsung's existing facility. The overtime was nice: a 6 - 10 schedule with the promise of an occasional double-time Sunday to sweeten the deal.

Working at a chip plant was a real eye-opener. The clean room protocols made an operating theater seem gross in comparison. The suit up procedure took place in a kind of air lock anteroom. Full suit-up took about 15 minutes, followed by an inspection from a protocol officer, who made sure not square inch of bare skin was visible.

Even the slightest speck of dust was equivalent (on a microchip) to an enormous bolder dropping on a highway. Drilling a hole in a piece of metal, for instance, required one person to hold the drill and another worker holding a HEPA-filtered vacuum hose at the tip of the drill.

Technicians with air-sampling devices constantly prowled the plant testing the cleanliness of the air. Workers who failed to abide strictly by the protocols were swiftly shown the door.

The money was good, no doubt, but the stress of working 60+ hours a week gradually wore down even the hardiest. Zombification warred with determination in a tedious marathon to make it to the end of the week. If a threshold number of accidents occurred, Samsung officials would stand down the project for one or two rest days.



Part Two, coming up soon.

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