Brian Buffalo

Brian Buffalo can kiss my ass. He really can. Me and my buddy Larry run the heat set machine across the river at the Delta plant. We've done it for near 20 years. And we're pretty good at it. Fact is that we hold the fabric processing record company wide. We run more rolls in one eight hour shift than any other team in history. See, that plant record business was started back in the late seventies as a way to make us under paid and over worked textile workers work harder. They couldn't be obvious about it because during the campaign when they sussessfully convinced us to vote down the union, they told us all these reasons why we didn't need the union. Seeing as how things were already so good and all. Their motto was "The Union's already kicked our ass once, don't let 'em do it again," and it was always placed just below a confederate flag. Made a nice bumper sticker. And it worked. So, to turn around and tell us we had to work harder would've seemed hypocritical. More importantly, it might have caused us to reconsider our postion with regard to the union. That's how they came up with the plant record business.

A certificate suitable for framing and a $100 bonus. Plenty enough to make a working man work harder. So me and Larry figured that as long as the record business was hanging over our head, we'd be hearing all kinds of lame pep talks and what not. We decided that the only way to ensure our peace was to set a record that was so high it was unattainable. So one Friday morning we came upon a plan. Our shift started at 3:00 pm and lasted to 11:00 pm. We met at Sonny's Grill for lunch around 1:00. Had a couple of burgers, several Jolt Colas and about five black beauties each. By 3:00 we were cranking as we pulled into the parking lot behind plant #3. We turned cloth like a couple of fiends for exactly eight hours. Damn near doubled the old record. When the bell rang we limped to the infirmary to put in our request for injury time, seeing as how our hands were burned and raw and every muscle in our record holding bodies pulled and worse. We each got four days off, a certificate suitable for framing and $100. We threw away the certificates and drank away the $100. But we never heard too much after that about plant records. That was 15 years ago. Last week we got ourselves a new assistant shift manager. Mr Brian Buffalo, 23 years old and straight out of Chesterfield-Marlboro Technical College. His first night on the job he told everyone on our shift that he was gonna change some things. That he had challenged the shift supers for the first and third shift to a contest. The most productive shift each moth won. Larry asked what exactly did they win. Brian Buffalo said we'd win a certificate suitable for framing and his favor. I laughed and said that I figured we had all the certificates we needed and that he could do me a favor and shut the hell up. His face twisted all up like he'd swallowed a lemon and he said we had better treat him with respect or he'd have no problem writing a memo to the plant manager. Two years at CMTC and that's the best he could come up with. Well, it's almost 1:00 so I got to go meet Larry. We're having lunch at Sonny's. Brian Buffalo can kiss my ass. He really can