Article 155796 of talk.bizarre:
Path: chaph.usc.edu!usc!phakt.usc.edu!not-for-mail
From: pechever@phakt.usc.edu (The Heckler)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Yesod : Rivets
Date: 17 Jun 1993 22:26:34 -0700
Organization: 5150 Memorial Scholarship Committee (A wholly owned subsidiary of X Industries)
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Summary: hoppin' down the tree
Keywords: qbl naked man beautiful and strong

Layin' steel.  The hours are long, the work is hard.  The pay's pretty decent.
It's not a job where you get bored often.  When you get bored, you're likely
to suddenly find yourself losin' an argument with a half-ton I-beam.

People die on the sites; not often, thank goodness, but often enough to keep
folks antsy.  Ray's a bit edgier'n most.  He's the foreman.  Can't really 
blame him, seein' as he's lost a brother and an uncle to the steel.

Steel gets hungry sometimes, y'know.  When the shift's done, an' a few of the 
boys are together at the bar, sometimes enough liquor finds its way down enough
throats.  Then the stories are brought out.  Thin Bill tells of how this guy's
toolbox fell off a sixteenth floor, straight towards Thick Bill, Thin Bill's
old man, who was on the twelfth.  The guy hollers a warning, and Bill dodges, 
bein' thick but not slow.  Thin Bill swears to this day he saw that toolbox _swerve_ towards Thick Bill, knockin' him off the structure.

Three other witnesses agree with 'im.  The stories keep on comin'; brand-new
cables snappin' at exactly the wrong times.  Rivet guns switchin' on by 
themselves.  Solid welds givin' way under one man's weight.  Sometimes the men
tellin' the stories look pale.  Some shake.  Some tell 'em quietly, with no
emotion.  Those are the dangerous ones.  If you interrupt, or make fun, or
in any way hint that you don't believe them, they'll fight.  Ever so often 
someone winds up quietly dead.

The stories get passed on, crew to crew, bar to bar.  We go over 'em like
Father McCardles goes over his beads.  It's a sick sort of thrill, knowin'
somethin' about the steel regular folks don't.  But knowin' somethin' just 
helps you see other things you don't.  Like why the steel hungers, or what
it finds in our deaths that's so satisfyin'.

Doesn't stop us from building, though.  Folks got to eat.  After a time, it 
don't even matter anymore.  So what if the steel's hungry?  We've been hungry
too, lots of us.  We can forgive the steel for takin' what food it can.  Not
that we don't hurt, or cry, when someone close to us dies on a site.  But 
we've all got to go sometimes, an' it's a clean death, bein' pinned to the
ground by an I-beam.

Well, I'd better get off t'bed.  Got to get to work in the mornin'.

heckler