El Burro Volador

…and what do you get?

In this blog’s short history, I have spent quite a few posts describing a typical morning in the snug little zoo/asylum I call home.  Five days a week, these zany mornings give way to their polar opposite, as I drive my battered car to the local sulfur mines for another drab day of tiresome menial labor that will soon be indistinguishable from the day before.

I park as far away as possible, both to delay the actual start of my work day and to keep the other miners from seeing my car.  I am one of the few  miners to own a car, and some of the other miners chaffed me for it when I first started.  Pepe would only call me “rico” for about a month, and Yevgeny didn’t stop making jokes about it until I “accidentally” hit him with a spanner.

I trudge up to the gates and make sure to find my detachment.  I am part of Drudge Detail 168.  My detachment also has in it Pavel, Pepe and Yevgeny.  Our overseer is Grigalt, but we mostly call him “boss” if we don’t want to get whipped.  When we are on boring duty, Ilsa the mechanic usually runs the giant steam-borer for us.  Boring duty is actually the most exciting duty – this is one of our favorite jokes.

I find my place with my detachment and we crowd into the cages with the other drudges assigned to our tunnel.  It is a good tunnel, we rarely have trouble meeting the quota.  After a minute or two, the big whistle blows like the sky is screaming at us, and the foreman slams all the cage doors.  Then the cages start to go down into the ground.  It is not so bad for me, because the cages go so slow you barely notice, but Pepe gets nervous.  I try to tell him jokes to distract him.  Pavel doesn’t like Pepe, he says that he is stealing jobs from us, but I like him because he doesn’t speak much English, so he is real quiet.  Not like that bigmouth Yevgeny.  I don’t like Yevgeny at all.

After a while, cages reach the bottom, and Grigalt is there to open the door for us (how does he get down here?) so we can start our shift.