Spurious Partitions

notoriouslyconservative.com ^ | 03 27 09 | Tom Bumgardner

[Notoriously Conservative]

From Tom Bumgardner's Book: Lawgic: Cruel and Usual Punishment

This is a true story.

In 1950, I worked at the Owens-Illinois Bottle Plant in Charleston , West Virginia . Owens-Illinois was a two-story building with its main entrance at the corner of 57th Street and McCorkle Avenue . The plant covered more than two square blocks and its sister plant, Libby-Owens-Ford, a plate glass factory, was directly across McCorkle Avenue , a main thoroughfare in an otherwise residential community. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Company serviced both plants with rail spurs going into them. Many workers of both factories lived within walking distance of their jobs.

The first floor of O-I housed furnaces used for glass melting, bottle molds for repeat customers, storage facilities for many thousands of bottles for medicines, liquors, cleansers, beer and soft drinks, and a railroad spur.

The tracks of the spur entered the plant at 59th Street and ran the length of the building to within 50 feet of the entrance at 57th Street . On one side of the tracks, identical with the floors of subway systems, only wider, were the loading docks, a non-interrupted structure of concrete running the length of the spur where goods were shipped and received daily. When goods were ordered, cartons of cardboard boxes with the bottles inside them would be stacked onto the loading dock some eight or ten feet from the rails.

The main offices were located on the second floor. In addition to those offices, there was a regulation-size basketball court, additional storage spaces and ‘specialty’ work areas doing such work as drilling holes in the bottom of display whiskey bottles. (We didn’t want our customers to order bottles for display and then use them for the real thing.)

Part of my work included taking inventory...

[Notoriously Conservative]

http://www.notoriouslyconservative.com/2009/03/spurious-partitions.html

[SES1066]

Thanks for bringing my attention to a most salutary example of individual vs governmental interaction. The underlying story is hilarious in demonstrating how a prank can generate consequences far beyond imagining due to inevitable bureaucratic processes even in the 'free-wheeling 1950s' - God alone knows what current examples might be.

While the author points to the judiciary as an area where corrections are difficult / impossible to make, I wonder about those decisions or actions made by the very bureaucratic 'alphabet agencies' like OSHA, EPA and EOC. I have heard (third-hand plus) of stories about proper positioning of fire extinguishers where companies / factories are wrung out in attempting to resolve conflicts between governmental regulations & inspectors.

This is what SCARES me about the Obama push to increase governmental intrusion. Nothing is so permanent as a bureaucracy and its stakeholder group(s). Every new governmental employee is a BURDEN upon the non-governmental economy and some of the proposals by President Obama make it clear that a much larger government is in the works.