Mind if I smoke? I know what you’re thinking. Keep your shirt on; I’m not about light off a Camel, or even produce a vape from a hidden pocket. Keep your shirt on, and your steel toed boots, and your hard hat. Definitely keep your hard hat on.

Allow me to explain. Once upon a time, I was an auditor. I know, it sounds like a career that is exciting, alluring, even seductive. But, trust me, there is nothing seductive about sitting in front of an old style 10-key calculator for hours on end “footing” a big computer printout to see if it really adds up to what it says it adds up to. If you think that makes no sense, you are not alone, but it was 1990, computers were not to be trusted in the realm of automated accounting, and they paid young guys like me to try and validate what was true and what was not.

Getting out of the office was always a welcomed distraction. Accordingly, I looked with excitement at the opportunity to go “inventory” an oil refinery on the Texas Gulf Coast. A team of several twenty somethings like myself flew into Corpus Christi and went straight to the old Champlain refinery. Before we could enter the refinery and get to work, management at the facility required us to go thru a four hour safety training course. After the course was completed, we had our boots, our heavy tape measures, our clipboards, and our hard hats, complete with fancy little stickers saying we had been “safety training certified”. Oh, and we also knew where all the marked blue safety zones were inside the refinery, just in case there was a fire.

I was assigned to work with two veteran refinery employees, and out to the old truck we went for the start of a 36 hour marathon. This was when the fun began, at least for said veteran employees.

If you’ve not been to a refinery before, they store the oil, and gasoline, and other chemicals in those large white tanks that dot the landscape in petroleum country. I should add, those large white tanks have very tiny stairways that wrap up and around the side of the tank, all the way up to the floating roof. Once on the roof, you may have to repeat the exercise on a sliding ladder to go back down into the tank.

This is when the fun began. We lifted the lid into the tank, and I dutifully asked my companions what this first counted tank contained. The reply? “Unleaded gasoline”. I almost could not hear what the man said, as he was balancing a cigarette between his teeth and fishing around for a light. Needless to say, my companions had a good laugh at the shocked expression on my face. It seems that thousands of gallons of unleaded and cigarettes aren’t a good mix. Go figure. And, my experience that day was being refined by the good humor of those men.

The work was hard. The air was hot and sticky. The stairways were frighteningly narrow, and tiring to climb. The boots were uncomfortable. So was the hard had, but we were required to keep it on, and I resented it. As I rose up from the hatch on the second or third tank, I proceeded to smack my head on the overhead rigging, and it left a huge gash in the pristine white plastic finish on my newly earned hard hat. All I had to show for it was a slight headache, and suddenly I was not quite so resentful. I even began to find my companions a bit easier to like. I was a victim, or maybe a beneficiary, of the refiner’s fire.

Life is like that. I often wonder why things seem so hard. Tedious situations don’t ever seem to resolve quite as quickly as I would like, but they tend to teach me a thing or two. When a precious metal refiner puts the raw ore into the heat, the impurities are burned off, and what survives and is produced is stronger, purer, and more lovely to hold.

I learned a few things on that trip thru the refinery back in 1990, and I have hat number six of twenty-seven, save one, to prove it. And I have a healthy respect for what it means to endure to the end.

As we finished our adventure that weekend, the refinery foreman took us all out for a steak dinner, muddy boots, sweaty hard hat hairlines, and all. It was a nice byproduct to the refining process.

So, I hope you don’t mind if I smoke, figuratively speaking. It reminds me to keep my shirt on, and my hard hat, safety training sticker and all…