My Life as a Steam Trap Operator

Dad called it character-building. I called it shit work. Either way, I tested steam traps at ExxonMobil for two months in the summer of 2006 and hated every bit of it. I was the youngest person on my team at Rawson L&P, the contracting company that was sent to do the dirty work at the refinery. We specialized in instrumentation and other forms of non-skilled or somewhat partially-skilled labor that the white collars shunned. I suppose if you had skin that would tolerate the 300+ degree heat inside of the units then you could do pretty well as a contractor. I usually try to avoid blazing hot weather if at all possible, so I had a feeling that this two-month engagement would be short-lived. No way in hell would I trade this for college.

My first day was memorable, but not in the same way that Grandma’s 80th birthday, a trip to a foreign country or any other special event is considered memorable. It was raining, of course. What would a first day be like without rain? I was driving my pistachio-colored Chevy Aveo. I can only imagine what I must’ve looked like against the rows of dirty pickups in the congested contractor parking lot. As nondescript as Liberace playing in a saloon.

The first thing that I felt as I got out of the car was mud. It quickly caked my brand new Wolverine steel-toed leather work boots. I squished towards the back of the dismally long line to pick up my I.D. badge. My supervisor was fifteen minutes late, but he finally found me in my soaking wet coveralls, looking like a lost dog. He told me that I was in the wrong line, and we both squished together inside a small shack next to the parking lot.

I stared at my badge after it was processed. The look on my face said I don’t want to be here. This shit is not for me. I gave the woman behind the processing desk a few signatures, and my supervisor told me to follow him out to the other side of the parking lot, the part that wasn’t covered with mud. This area, naturally, was designated for ExxonMobil employee parking only. He took me in the gray Rawson truck through the refinery, and it was at that moment that I knew I would be diving head first in the blue collar lifestyle, the culture that I loathed more than ever. Both of my parents work for ExxonMobil, so that’s what I hear, eat and breathe every day after 5:30. I know all of their coworkers’ names, even though I’ve only really met about a dozen of them, and I know all of their stories. Who was a jerk, who was a slut, who was two years away from retirement, who took a piss off of a cooling tower, who had an off-the-job injury and made a sorry excuse to their first and second-line supervisors, who got the new boob job, who got lucky with his brother’s wife over the weekend, who got fired for stealing company materials, who drove their family insane and had to room with one of their buddies for an indefinite amount of time, who finally got freedom. I had to hear it all.

As Scott and I drove through the refinery, I felt as though we had chartered into unknown territory. Everyone dressed in fire-retardant clothing (that was mandatory, of course) and everyone called each other by a nickname and their sentences were mostly comprised of acronyms. “Hey Jimbo, didja go to the CC yet? Karen’s lookin’ extra perky today. I gotta go do some shit over at the BOP and then go to the IHC.” It was a strange language, indeed.

I eventually understood a few things that most of the workers and process operators were talking about. CC meant control center. FRC’s were the hot jumpsuits we wore every day, adding what seemed about ten pounds to our body weight, making mobility and overall movement a daily challenge.

Our first stop was the small trailer that housed the Rawson L&P employees. When I walked in, the first thing I smelled was burned toast. The smell penetrated my nostrils, and I thought I was going to get nauseous from direct inhalation. The toaster had something stuck in its crevices from days long ago, and virtually anything that was cooking or not cooking had the odor of charred bread. There were weights sprawled on the ground, miscellaneous papers and household items cluttered on crowded cabinets and kitchen countertops. My group had a solitary room in the back of the trailer that was slightly bigger than a hallway closet and meant to hold five workers, a desk, and a small assortment of chairs. This is going to be our headquarters until our job is complete, said Scott, and it’s gonna be at least six to eight months before we’re through.

The first unit that I worked on was called the De-asphalt unit. It was the dirtiest one of them all, according to the process operator that led me and Scott to our station. We crawled through a labyrinth of hot pipes and smoking chambers, valves attached to wheezing compressors, and the little things called steam traps that I was hired to test. It was the closest thing to hell that I have ever encountered.
We approached our first stop, an intimidating tower of gizmos that looked like it had the capability to cause a nuclear explosion. He asked me where the steam trap was located on the structure and what type it was. I didn’t even know what a steam trap looked like. I shrugged my shoulders like an idiot. Scott sighed and pointed to where the steam trap was. He said that it was called a bucket trap. I saw no resemblance, but I nodded and acted as interested as I could. He told me that it was a Nicholson, and that my job for the next two weeks was reaching around each trap (which could be as hot as 300 degrees), removing the old steel tag around it and adding a brand new one. Then he told me that I had to memorize every type and make of every single steam trap on the unit. There were at least several thousand in the De-asphalt.

Dad and I had our daily “How was work?” talks when I got home at 5:45, but I didn’t feel like talking. I felt like sleeping for a week. I would usually tell him “Good” or “All right” just to keep him from talking, but I realized that if my answer seemed too pedestrian he would just ask more questions. I counted down the days until freedom like a prisoner. My check was late coming in, and for three and a half weeks I felt like the only payment I’d get would be in form of lymphoma, lung disease or third-degree burns.

After my two-week stint as a tag remover was complete, I graduated to a new phase in my career. I had to test each of the traps with an odd looking gadget and write down the temperature and a number of other statistics. It was a thermometer that tested high temperature metals with the help of a floppy metal dildo with a rubber covering. This also meant that I had to work at a faster rate than before to keep up with the daily quota since testing traps took twice as long as adding and removing tags. I sweated profusely every day, praying that I wouldn’t burn or injure a vital part of me that I would need to use in the future. I worked 4-10s, but it felt longer, it felt like I had sold my soul to whomever the jerk was that invented manual labor, and my supervisor was Mephistopheles.

I worked with three other guys. One of them quit the day after I arrived, and I didn’t even get to find out his name. The other two, Josh and Kevin, were anything but helpful during my first few weeks on the job. Josh was a bumbling alcoholic who thought he was God’s gift to humankind. One time we were posted at the sulfur unit, and while I was testing the traps he was dipping a whole carton of Grizzly tobacco in his mouth, spitting up brown lumps on the console. His lower lip always looked like it was covered in thick chocolate milk. I swear I almost puked that day. On the weekends, he would play golf and get so drunk that he would show up at work about thirty minutes to an hour late on Mondays. And sometimes Wednesdays.

Kevin was an arrogant prick and an alcoholic as well, but younger and baby-faced. He had a ray-ed (red) truck. He rarely took off his faux-Versace shades, which irritated me to no end. I could never tell if he was mad or complacent or satisfied. After a while, I just didn’t care. He would usually come in, stuff a sandwich in the fridge and then proceed to talk about his weekend sexcapades. One week the guys taught me how to hire a Mexican prostitute and let her know how I wanted her to lick the “sweet spot.” I was also well informed about how to land a Hooters girl on Fridays in the back parking lot after hours. I had to ask for Gillian.

After the first month, I had a new problem to deal with. Scott hired a new guy to test traps because Kevin was considering a job change into instrumentation. The new guy was named Leroy, and I was supposed to train him on testing steam traps and doing data entry. He had one ear, so I had to talk to him from the left side. He was a bit rough around the edges, and I had to tread softly on certain issues. According to Scott, I couldn’t talk about Leroy’s ex-wife and I couldn’t talk about his ear, or lack thereof. He was 45 years old, supporting a woman and her illegitimate child, and the job at Rawson was the highest paid job he ever held. I had to teach him how to cut and paste on Microsoft Excel for our daily data entry work, which took much longer than I originally had anticipated. I also had to teach Leroy how to differentiate between fifteen makes and twenty different models of steam traps. I was embarrassed one day before we went out on the unit because I offered him half a pack of earplugs. He didn’t seem to mind.

One week of training went by, and Leroy and I were at the De-Asphalt. I told him that if he crouched down to check the lower traps, he had to watch out for the small tubes that released piping hot steam and condensation. I emphasized this by showing him the small purple mark on my ankle from the first week. Everything went smoothly until I heard a “HOLY SHIT!!!” and saw Leroy covering his crotch. He dropped the thermometer in a black puddle, so I picked it up and finished the job while he teetered towards the service truck.

The admissions deadline was a week away, and I had to make a decision. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life at that point, but I knew what I didn’t want to do. My parents had this dream of me becoming a doctor, more specifically, an anesthesiologist. I had even convinced myself that was a reasonable option for about five years, but reality gave me a rude awakening. I wasn’t in the top ten percent of my graduating class, I didn’t get any scholarships, I didn’t ace the SAT and I didn’t get accepted to Rice or Yale. I‘m just some knothead, a word coined by Josh and Kevin, who’s single, lives with his parents and has a dirty job that pays well but won’t get me where I want to go. The single part I can live with, since many of my high school acquaintances found out late that too much sex leads to babies, which in turn leads to early marriages and/or dropping out of school, which in turn leads to extra responsibility. They made a choice.

After eight weeks of suffering, I finally found the courage to let Scott know what I felt about the job and the environment, in general. He was disappointed, but then he told me that he had anticipated my departure, which was the real reason that he hired Leroy. I wished him and the rest of my crew the best, and I was happy to get the hell out of that place. I was finally free from the units, the unbearable heat, the redneck dialogue, the sex stories, the Alan Jackson songs that blared in Josh’s service truck, and everything in between.

The afternoon was dank and humid the Friday I quit my job as a technician, but it wasn’t raining and my boots weren’t as muddy as they were the first day. When I drove my pistachio-colored Aveo out of the contractor parking lot for the last time, I thought about all the stories that Leroy would have to hear from Josh and Kevin. I crossed the railroad tracks that separated the refinery from the road, and I imagined that one day Kevin might finally take that instrumentation job. Josh would probably apply to work at ExxonMobil, and Leroy would keep taking orders from Scott. I found out during my sophomore year that most of my team left the company within six months after I left. There would probably be another Josh, another Kevin, another Leroy and another Scott. When I got in the car, I turned on the A/C and took a deep breath of the clean, odorless air that slowly replaced the nitrous gases that still lingered inside. As I drove further away from that part of town, I remembered the side where the sun strikes the reactors and towers before setting, setting the units on fire with pinks and purples and golds like a radioactive rainbow.