TOP OF THE WORLD

Most organizations have some kind of Hazing Ritual, either formal or informal. Stupid as it may be, hazing is a way to create emotional bonds between members of a group, which is why attempts to stamp out some of the more egregious examples of it meet with so much resistance.

Hazing will typically become newsworthy when a particularly stupid or dangerous version of it goes sour. Shaving your head and standing in the middle of Main Street with your pants down are examples of the first type; chugging an entire fifth of mezcal and sticking the worm up your ass is an example of the second. (That worm’ll kill you, man.) Every couple of years, some college freshman gets croaked when a hazing ritual goes too far. There’s an uproar, the co-participants are punished, and two years later, it’s the Same Old Shit.

I never had to endure the type of hazing that went with joining a fraternity, mainly because there were no fraternities where I went to school. (Thank you, Woodrow Wilson.) But after I went to work, I still had to prove that I had the Right Stuff.

In my early days of working for The Great Corporate Salt Mine, I actually had a chance to make use of my snazzy new Chemical Engineering degree. I would, from time to time, have to leave the confines of my office and go out to the Chemical Plant, which was located in the midst of what was then the second-largest refinery in the country. There, I would usually be involved in running tests on various pieces of equipment, trying to figure out what we would have to modify in order to expand our capacity by (say) 50%.

As a young engineer, I had to deal with Veteran Process Operators – the guys that actually pushed the buttons and turned the valves that ran the plant. I also has to deal with the plant technical managers – engineers like me, but, like the Process Operators, grizzled veterans. Hell, if you had been there two years, you were a grizzled veteran to me.

And these guys always liked to give young, fresh-faced engineers a hard time. The classic method was to send the Fresh Meat to the top of one of the fractionating towers to catch a sample.

If you’ve ever driven past a refinery or chemical plant, you may have noticed a lot of very tall, vertical tubes, festooned with platforms, vertical ladders, and a whole lotta piping. Those are fractionating towers. They’re nothing but gigantic stills, in which mixtures of chemicals are boiled and condensed in order to separate different components.

Think of them as a giant, economy-size version of Rob’s little Homemade Moonshine Wine Factory.

And what you would do is climb those vertical ladders until you got to the right spot on the tower to catch your sample…depending on which tower, and what you were trying to get, that might involve a climb of 50, 75, or 200 feet. If you were lucky, the sample port would be conveniently located at one of the horizontal platforms, so you could stand or crouch while catching the sample. The horizontal platforms really were there so that you never had a vertical climb of more than 25 feet or so – you would climb, come out on a platform, and walk around the platform to get to the next ladder. That way, if you fell, you wouldn’t fall all the way down – just to the next platform down. Ouch.

To catch the sample, you would hook a metal cylinder – a “bomb” – to the sample port. Open a couple of valves, close a couple of valves, and you had your sample. You would then climb back down and deliver the sample to the lab, where they would test it in order to get some meaningless result.

Because the objective of the exercise was not what was in the sample bomb. It was to see whether you had the ’nads to climb that huge-ass tower. The taller, the better.

And I’ve gotta tell you that even on a sweaty Texas morning, the view from the heights of Fractionation World is pretty exhilarating…even if all you’re looking at is a damn Refinery.

Top o’ the world, Ma!