I decided to try welding for a new career. I asked Compo to pay my tuition, but they said no, so I cashed in a pension for 14,000 and went to welding school. I decided to take all three levels at once, so I signed up for my “C,” “B,” and “A” tickets. One of my classmates turned out to be a cousin of my wife’s named Mel. He was a great guy, and his lady, Cheryl, was such a sweet girl. Mel and I talked during class about how expensive it was to go to school. We decided that they could move in with us, share costs and Mel and I could go back and forth in one car. This was great, we all got along very well. Mel was only going for his C ticket, so he would be in school for about 10 months. After getting his “C” ticket, they moved to Coal Harbour, where Mel was going to work for Cheryl’s dad.
Initially, the course material was pretty boring; I was doing things that I knew quite well. But I finally began to learn more once I was on my “B” ticket. I learned how to Tig weld both stainless steel and aluminum, and I loved the whole process. Here, I also began to learn fabrication. My “A” ticket training was all fabrication with a bit of the aluminum wire feed pound gun. One day, while learning some ways to Tig weld, my welder shorted out just as my elbow touched the table, making a circuit. I came to my senses out in the hall. The power of that shock blew me 3 meters and rattled my teeth.
The next day, I was helping a classmate in setting up his computer and in the process, I arc flashed both my eyes. I managed to get up to the hospital on my own; my eyes felt like they were filled with sand. Once there, they had to freeze my eyes and then bandage them, telling me I needed to keep my eyes covered for 48 hours. I had to phone my wife’s mom to bring up Dad so he could drive me and my truck home. For the next 48 hours, I was blind. Just to have a pee was tough. My wife had to cut my food and place it in a bowl so I could eat with my fingers without losing too much. This was the longest 48 hours of my life.
I had specialized in stainless steel and aluminum. I loved aluminum welding and had dreams of working for a shipbuilding company. My instructor had been welding aluminum for many years; he told me I was better than he could ever be. He had me stay after graduating for several weeks so he could teach all he knew about this process. He was a great teacher.
After graduating, I sent in applications to all the boat-building companies I could find, but I only found work on a pile driver as a head welder. We were putting in dolphins in booming grounds. Welding on the pile driver was a wet job, and getting shocked was a daily experience. It was not bad work, though, and they paid me extremely well. I had a young welder working under me, and he did a lot of the shit jobs. He later got married to my niece and is now my nephew. The crew was a great bunch of guys, and the head guy was the spitting image of Kiefer Sutherland, so I called him Kiefer. Then there was a turn in the economy, and the jobs began to have a lot of space between them. At least I had the ticket for future work.
I had been offered pipeline work in Alberta, but refused anything to do with the oil fields. Brown and Root, who were out of Texas offered me work in Kuwait welding oil pipelines back together after Saddam and his army had a meltdown and set it on fire. The pay was to be more than I ever made before if I signed on for a year, but I had a wife and young kids that I wanted to see grow up. Heard later that some workers had been shot.
At this time, friends of ours were going through a divorce; they had a construction company that they both ran, and the wife took that for her share of the settlement. She hired me as a commercial building’s insulation subcontractor, not my favourite type of work, but it paid the bills. I was grateful for the job. One project had me insulating a new gas station in Courtenay. There was an on-the-job accident that resulted in my right big toe getting damaged, leaving me with severe nerve damage, and they needed to remove a neuroma from my toe, which consisted of a disorganized growth of nerve cells at the site of the injury. A neuroma is very painful. After the operation, my foot still hurt, and I could not work for quite some time, back on and fighting compo again. After another round of appeals on my claim with the board, I was awarded almost 35000.00. This was awesome, as I had heard about a government program to retrain people who had been injured on the job. This money would help me to pay bills while at school.