NFL conference championships are over and the Box salutes Harbaugh West and Harbaugh East. Well done, Harbaugh stakeholders!
We have a couple weeks to kill before Super Bowl Sunday, and I need a column. The Homeless World Cup (national soccer teams made up of homeless athletes), which is prime column material, doesn’t go off until October. Baseball training camps won’t open for another three weeks. The NBA isn’t interesting until the playoffs. The NHL should be sold and moved offshore. I’ll leave Lance for the rest of the media to pick over.
What’s left? Well, there’s Manti Te’o, Notre Dame’s All-American linebacker and his fake girlfriend. A friend suggested a column on fake girlfriends. He knows I worked on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and supposed there must have been a lot of talk among workers about girlfriends and some of those girlfriends must have been fake. And did I have a story about that?
Well, actually, I don’t. Not one. Perhaps because there were 100 men for every woman when the big job kicked off. And even later, when women began to be hired, that ratio might have changed, to be generous, to 100 men for 5 women, but always, the sexual ratio was outrageously out of balance. The extreme imbalance made talking about women and, therefore, sex, unpredictable in its consequence.
Maybe that was it, or maybe not. Who knows? But, in any case, talking about women, girlfriends, wives, daughters, was not done. I hasten to add this was my experience; others will have different views. Still, I did work out of Laborers Local 942 for 15 years, worked the pipeline, worked Prudhoe Bay, the DEW Line, for the City of Barrow, City of Fairbanks, on highway jobs, an Air Force station, hard-dollar residential jobs, jobs from Juneau to Valdez to Anchorage to Fairbanks to the Arctic Ocean, and once on a barge in the Beaufort Sea. I’ve never heard talk, be it in break rooms, dining halls, on work buses, at night in construction camps or hotel rooms, over a bottle of whiskey or a glass of tea, about girlfriends, much less fake girlfriends.
It was against the code. There is, of course, a code. Every vocation has one. Follows is the Building & Construction Trades Code, Arctic Circuit:
NFL conference championships are over and the Box salutes Harbaugh West and Harbaugh East. Well done, Harbaugh stakeholders!
We have a couple weeks to kill before Super Bowl Sunday, and I need a column. The Homeless World Cup (national soccer teams made up of homeless athletes), which is prime column material, doesn’t go off until October. Baseball training camps won’t open for another three weeks. The NBA isn’t interesting until the playoffs. The NHL should be sold and moved offshore. I’ll leave Lance for the rest of the media to pick over.
What’s left? Well, there’s Manti Te’o, Notre Dame’s All-American linebacker and his fake girlfriend. A friend suggested a column on fake girlfriends. He knows I worked on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and supposed there must have been a lot of talk among workers about girlfriends and some of those girlfriends must have been fake. And did I have a story about that?
Well, actually, I don’t. Not one. Perhaps because there were 100 men for every woman when the big job kicked off. And even later, when women began to be hired, that ratio might have changed, to be generous, to 100 men for 5 women, but always, the sexual ratio was outrageously out of balance. The extreme imbalance made talking about women and, therefore, sex, unpredictable in its consequence.
Maybe that was it, or maybe not. Who knows? But, in any case, talking about women, girlfriends, wives, daughters, was not done. I hasten to add this was my experience; others will have different views. Still, I did work out of Laborers Local 942 for 15 years, worked the pipeline, worked Prudhoe Bay, the DEW Line, for the City of Barrow, City of Fairbanks, on highway jobs, an Air Force station, hard-dollar residential jobs, jobs from Juneau to Valdez to Anchorage to Fairbanks to the Arctic Ocean, and once on a barge in the Beaufort Sea. I’ve never heard talk, be it in break rooms, dining halls, on work buses, at night in construction camps or hotel rooms, over a bottle of whiskey or a glass of tea, about girlfriends, much less fake girlfriends.
It was against the code. There is, of course, a code. Every vocation has one. Follows is the Building & Construction Trades Code, Arctic Circuit: