I worked 3:30-12:00 shift, teamsters union, at a local recycling plant, with mandatory overtime when needed, + I did switches, swap trailers 40 some odd miles away after my regular shift, never a dull moment there + I was attending a 2 year school for civil engineering technology, from 8-2pm. I started there at age 17, by the time I was 18 I was yard foreman. The people who worked here were ex cons, burn outs, drugs alcohol, mostly weed and beer, thieves, couple a bad @sses at times, thugs, being a clean cut kid, I did not fit in. Someone got peeved when I got the foreman job, and I had people after me, it was like a prison inside the plant. I fought my out of problems twice in that hell hole, this was a real scary place at night, in and outside the plant. I never hated a job so much as I did this place. One of the fights started when the guy they put up to it, literally flipped the lunch table over while I was having lunch, some fat army veteran, who wore his this grime stained field jacket for years since his discharge. He outweighed me by a mile, he went every bit of 300-325. Brawl time, took several shots to the groin and one real hard hit to get him off and away from me, and you knew no one was coming to stop this, it was a set up, me and him now in a concrete block room together. All for a $1.50/hr raise that came with the foreman title. I took another job later that year, same darned place this guy ended up, well just great.. he told one of the counter guys about this fight we had and that he'd never been hit so hard by anyone, even in the army. He had some broken facial bones or some problem, that's what you get when your opponent fears for their life. He never came near me at that place, just avoided me. The other fight involved another jerk in plastics, that they put up to trying to get rid of me, he came after me with an axe handle, and I was darned lucky I was well trained on how to deal with that particular kind of situation, I got his arm when he took a swipe at me, he dropped the handle, and I chased him across the plant to a dark corner of an unused section and put some fear in him. I should have pummeled him to a pulp, I was angry as can be at that point, just hating this place, it was either stick it out or be on the street. This ended my problems there, no one bothered me again, but I still took the liberty to hide some short lengths of pipe in the catwalk safety railing posts pinned in by lynch pins at the floor of the catwalk which was about face level. I never could let my guard down. Pull a pin, a pipe falls into your hand, I had things hidden all over just in case. That thing in the lunch room was an ambush. Hated that place beyond comprehension, was never so glad to leave. I went back there late last summer, walked the ruins, just a bunch of concrete slabs now, brownfield site, no one will buy it. I took some photos, and went down memory lane, thinking of all the bad situations in that place at night, thinking how lucky I was no one had a knife, a gun or it was any worse than it was, it gave me some closure actually.
