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August 14, 2002
Los Gatos, California Since 1881 |
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NPR series reminds us to value our jobs
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Carl Heintze
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 The first job profiled in a National Public
Radio series on tough jobs concerns the workers who clean
out the insides of crude oil tanks in Texas.
That certainly seems to me like a tough job.
Crude oil tanks after a while collect sludge
that isn't really good for
much of anything. Even if it were, it has to
be flushed out of the tanks before they can
be filled again. The men who do this wear
protective clothing and masks, carry oxygen
bottles and work in short shifts, sometimes
as short as 15 minutes. They use hoses to
flush the sludge, which accumulates to a
depth of four or five inches on the bottom of
the tank.
But the chief villain of the work isn't the
sludge or the lack of fresh air—it's the
heat. Because the tanks are in Texas and
because it is summer, the temperature inside
sometimes gets up to around 120 degrees
Fahrenheit.
That's hot. Hotter than I'd want to be.
In spite of all this, the men who do the work
wouldn't trade their jobs for anything, at
least according to NPR. They're well-paid—they'd have to be, I'd guess—and they
consider themselves to be a kind of elite,
sort of like the Special Forces in
Afghanistan. The need to work fast and
efficiently makes them a team, they say.
So while most of us wouldn't think cleaning
giant oil tanks is much fun, they love it.
I got to thinking about this and other tough
jobs after hearing the NPR broadcast. I
suppose a job—no matter what it is—is only tough
if you make it that way. That got me thinking
about Albert Camus' essay, "The Myth of
Sisyphus."
Sisyphus was a character in Greek mythology.
He'd died and gone to the underworld, but he made a
deal with Pluto, the god of the underworld,
for a brief visit back to see his wife.
Unfortunately for him, he liked being back on
earth so much, he decided to stay. He stayed
too long. The gods, who didn't want any
mortals being immortal, packed him back to
the underworld. They sentenced him to spending the rest
of eternity—a long time—pushing a heavy
rock up a hill.But that wasn't the worst of
the punishment.
Just as he got the rock to the top of the
hill and relaxed, the rock rolled down to the
bottom of the slope and he had to start all
over again.
It looked like a terrible fate, but Camus,
the French writer, thought otherwise. He
pointed out that Sisyphus was happy in his
work because that's all he knew—trying to
roll a rock to the top of a hill. It didn't
matter to him that he never made it to the
top, just doing it over and over again was
what was important.
I don't know if that's how the tank cleaners
feel about it, but it would seem to me like
once you've seen the inside of one tank,
you've pretty much seen them all: They're
round, they don't have many openings and
their bottoms are covered with sludge.
But maybe that's not the way to look at it.
Maybe, as Camus said, the meaning is more in doing the job than
the quality of the job itself. As long as a job brings us satisfaction, that might be
all that matters.
Unfortunately, with a lot of jobs today, whether it is tightening bolts on an auto
assembly line or gathering lettuce in the
Salinas Valley, many workers really only get a
portion of a job. They seldom get to see the
fruition of their labor.
In days gone by, when craftsmen worked at a
job from beginning to end—making boots,
plowing, planting and harvesting a field or
simply heading westward—working was
different. There was a beginning and an end
to labor and it wasn't like rolling a rock up
a hill over and over again. Every day, every
season, every year was a new challenge. So it
is harder to find satisfaction in a workplace
that is fragmented into many small jobs that. Taken
together, these jobs create one thing, but a lot of
workers never get to see the finished
product.
But for our own sakes, we need to be like Sisyphus. We have to find
satisfaction in pushing the rock, not necessarily in
getting it anywhere.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to
the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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