The welder of today is a sweet looking affair.  The machine, that is, although, perchance, that description could include the one doing the welding.  The welders from the 1980’s got their styling, I suppose, from necessity.  They were large boxy things that took up a lot of space, were heavy on their feet and generally talked trash to you anytime you tried to move them around the shop. 

They were simpler; I didn’t see a one of them that I ever found a computer board on.  Just a series of wires connected to resistors and coils.  But sometimes those connections exposed the worst in some of us.

The welder we used, back in the combine shop at the local John Deere where I worked, was a bit dysfunctional at times.  Of course, the same description could be applied to those of us who used it if you wished to.

There were three of us who worked back there.  I worked in the middle bay.  The fella on the one side of me was your normal, friendly and helpful type.  He and I had lots of good times working side by side and got along most generally.  He once left the service call he was on to come help me on my service call, some 30 miles from where he was, and that at 11:30 at night.  I tried to do the same for him. 

The guy on the other side of me was from a different time and place entirely.  One might describe him as a bit churlish.  We tried to involve him in our shop banter and back and forth, but he would have nothing of it.  He came to work 20 minutes early in the morning and came back 20 minutes early from lunch every day.  He always worked long and hard right up to closing time.  He turned more money for that dealership than I can imagine in his 30 plus years working there.  But, if I needed help with something, I knew it was probably best not to ask him.  Although he didn’t have any scruples asking the rest of us for help.  I did ask him for help several times and got enough riff-raff back that I didn’t care to ask again.  He could be very demeaning when he wanted to be and didn’t seem to have any sense humor whatsoever.   

I was intrigued with him.  And that aura of mystique that he carried about himself only piqued my curiosity more every day, to the point that it seemed necessary to lighten up his world a bit; draw him out, so to speak.

Back to the welder in our shop.  It had developed a maddening problem of losing contact with itself somewhere deep inside.  In each section of the shop, there was one person designated to keep the shop equipment serviced and maintained.  This person happened to be our humorless friend, and so we looked to him to get this welder fixed.

But since the problem was so intermittent, he had a very hard time finding and fixing it.  He finally told us that if it acted up while we were using it, to kick the side of it and that usually got it back up and going. 

So, we kicked.  For several weeks.

Now I don’t want to sound rude or disrespectful; rather, I would like to appear as somewhat sympathetic to the betterment of humanity, and thus I took up an experiment to prove what really made this man that worked to the east of me tick, er, kick.

A prime opportunity presented itself not to long thereafter.  My humorless friend needed to do some repairs inside the bin of the combine he was working on.  These repairs involved the use of the aforesaid welder to do so. 

I waited until he was well down into the bin and had started welding before I made my way over to the load center and located the circuit breaker that was labeled, “welder.” 

I flipped it to the off position.

My other colleague, the helpful friendly one, watched with a questioning look on his face, but he quickly caught on to what my plan was and joined in by starting a conversation with me in the leeside of his combine. 

Our humorless colleague, muttering dire threats and implications against said welder, climbed up and out of the bin, down from the top of his combine and over to the welder.  The instant he delivered a kick to its side, I flipped the circuit breaker to the on position and right on cue it started running again. 

Again, I waited until he was deeply ensconced in his welding job down in the bin before flipping the breaker.  Again, we visited in the leeside of the combine.  Again, mutterings and dire threats.  Again, a swift kick.  Again, I flipped the breaker on.  Again, the welder ran.

And all over again the third time, except by this time, the threats had turned into curses and the implications into promises. 

I stepped out from the leeside of the combine in time so my colleague could see me before he delivered the kick that I was afraid would injure his toes and mentioned casually that I would probably stop flipping the breaker to the welder now and get back to my work.

In the rarest of instants, chivalry trumped churlishness, and he smiled. 

And it was soon afterwards that our welder was fixed.