Doctor G, The Rhino Factor

When my last employer went bankrupt I fell back on my skills as a carpenter
and superintendent. There was a commercial structure going up near my home
so I asked the owner if he needed any help. He was a fellow smoker and after a
few puffs he decided I would be an asset to the project. For the next two years I
ran excavators, cranes, manlifts, saws, and milling equipment. Heavy equipment
seems to have a connection in my brain. I hold the handle and I know what that
machine will do and what I can expect. I have to be a little sober, I donâ??t like to
smoke and run equipment around strangers. When itâ??s people I know thatâ??s a
different story, I know where they will be and I have some idea what to expect. So
when the weather was bad and the job site was partially shut down we smoked a
bunch.
I have four adult children and they are all hard workers. My number two
son is built like a linebacker and seems to never tire. The owner needed some
reliable local help so my son came on board. My son is a workhorse. When we
were flooring the three floors he was right there, flinging seventy pound sheets of
flooring on to the next floor so the owner and I could run the adhesive bead and
the air nailer. We floored 5000 square feet in three stories in a week. We hung
the joists off ladders and then floored over them. Twenty and thirty feet in the air
we would perch on a little plank and smoke another fatty. Of course we worked
twelve hours a day.
The ownerâ??s father was financing the project so he thought he was in
charge. While he did understand the checkbook he had never built a house
before, much less a three story commercial structure. He was too cheap to hire
an architect so he relied on an engineers plans for the structure and decided he
could wing the rest. It was a hellish project. We would put a wall in and he would
decide it needed to be moved. We were halfway through hanging the roof in
December when he decided he wanted a chimney. We had to stop what we were
doing and build a chimney structure so he could have it covered with rock. He
moved the stairs, the windows. He decided we needed to tear out windows we
had already installed and put in bigger ones. We shingled the outside of the
building in ten below zero weather while snow storms dropped several feet of
snow every week. There were no windows for the structure in the beginning ,
they had to be custom made, and he had never considered the time required to
construct the custom glass panels. Each window was unique. Every piece of
frame had to be custom milled; by me.
I burned out two cheap planers before I convinced the financier that it was
cheaper to buy good stuff once. I ran one saw until it smoked. I pushed
something like ten thousand feet of material through the machines before he was
satisfied. Some of the material was six inches thick and twenty feet long as I
pushed it through the planer. Of course every time he changed his mind I had to
salvage what I could and mill new stuff.
One of the carpenters was a professional and was most frustrated by the
way the job was going. He knew that a real crew with real plans could have had
this project finished in less than a year. We had the crew but there were no plans.
Worse still, what we had been told was the plan on Tuesday was not the plan by
Wednesday morning. Because of the financiers senility he always thought he had
told us of the production changes. This poor carpenter was just fuming. He
looked over at me and asked for a smoke, so I lit one up. As we discussed the
frustration of working in such an amateur atmosphere he asked how come I was
never bent out of shape.
I explained it was the rhinoceros factor.
â??The Rhino factor?â? he asked
â??Sureâ? I explained â?? I start out every morning with enough THC to stop a
rampaging rhinoceros. Then, no matter what Mel does, I can handle it!â?
He laughed, and laughed and laughed some more. Then he looked over
and told me his Rhino was still conscious and could I help. We smoked another
one while we waited for Mel to make his latest round of changes. Later in the day
Kerry came by and told me that I had the solution. We kept those rhinoâ??s sedated
for the next three months.