I was working for a whopping big, nasty ol’ chemical plant from 1981 to 1989. We had 1500 employees on site, and probably another five hundred or so contractors on any given day. And it was the eighties, and people were worried about drugs in the workplace. I guess the worries were warranted. When you’re chugging out three thousand tons of chlorine a day, and another 1500 tons of vinyl chloride, you tend to want your staff to be paying attention. You know, people screw up enough when stone cold sober.

So one day I’m working in the motor shop, perhaps the most boring thing an electrician could do in that plant, and the grapevine erupts with information. The company has brought in drug-sniffing dogs to search the premises. Sure enough, come mid-morning, here comes a bevy of management folks escorting this dude with a German shepherd. They sniffed all the cabinets and the drawers and lockers we kept our tools in, and they sniffed the common areas. And found nothing.

Me, I’m thinking “poor dog”. You couldn’t walk through the plant without traces of caustic soda and salt, and I could imagine the havoc that would play on delicate nostrils.

Anyhow, at the end of the day, they caught one employee with drugs. He was a young chemical engineer, and he had some small amount of marijuana in his office desk. I thought this to be proof that an engineering degree is not of itself an indication of intelligence and clarity of thought.

They fired him. Escorted him to the gate that day. Gone.

So we fast-forward a few years. I’m still at the same plant, except now I’m the shift electrician, the only electrician in a plant with three running powerhouses chugging out combined over half a gigawatt of power that they used right there inside the fence. It was a heady job. Any time something electrical went wrong, I got first (and usually last) crack at it. I had a good reputation with my boss and the electrical engineers in the plant, and was the only one of the four shift electricians (one for each of the four shifts) that was trusted to switch major power equipment around.

So I was out there one evening when one of our units had a hiccup and released a bit more of one noxious substance or another than was allowed without reporting it to the state The boss dutifully called the state Department of Environmental Quality, and they sent one of their people out in response. I was about other business at the time, so the next night I asked the boss how all that went.

“Well,” he said, “you remember that young engineer they caught with the dope in his desk?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I knew we were in trouble when that’s the guy that showed up for DEQ.”