Prologue

"It's GOOD to be the King!"

The line from that old Mel Brooks movie flashed through my head as I leaned back in my chair and thought about the recent changes in my life. No... I don't have royal blood coursing through my veins; nor do I hobnob with the well-to-do upper crust of society. I'm just a forty-ish "Waste Disposal Engineer" with slightly graying hair and a bit of a beer gut. But as I sit here in the twelve by fifteen living room of my 50 year-old house in this lower-middle class neighborhood, I'm sure that there aren't many —if any— modern-day kings that enjoy the life that I live.

No, I'm not a garbage man! My job title is actually "Waste Disposal Engineer" and I do have a BS in Chemical Engineering, thank you very much. That's my job at Sanders Chemicals. I dispose of waste chemicals and it is a pretty demanding job. You can't just sluice the stuff down the drain. Every compound, depending on its make-up, has different rules and regulations regarding its disposal. Some things get incinerated, some get buried, some have to be mixed with other compounds to be rendered harmless, and, yes, some things can just get dumped down the drain. But every microgram of the stuff, whether it comes to me in a test tube or a railroad tanker car has to be accounted for (in triplicate!) on those damned EPA forms. Every hour of work I spend incinerating, neutralizing, and sanitizing generates three hours of "paperwork" on the computer.

Sure, I have the degree, and I have a crew, but no matter how you spell it, "Waste Disposal" isn't the glamorous side of chemistry. Turnover is high, with people leaving every month to look for "more important work." We're always short-handed, so I end up doing some of the grunt work, as well as the paper work. The only thing that BS degree got me was 100% of the blame, anytime anybody on my staff screwed up. That makes my job 25% chemistry work, 75% paperwork, and 50% keeping an eye on my crew and covering my ass. I'm sure many of you have the same 12-hour breakdown of your 8-hour day.

But you're not here to listen to me carp about my job. Looking back, maybe it's my daily exposure to all those fumes and vapors that caused the big change in my life. Sure, we had all the protection gear money could buy, but most of us didn't bother to spend a half-hour suiting up and checking all the seals just to dump a test tube full of gunk in the incinerator. I had installed a shower stall in the corner of the garage so I could dump my work clothes in the washing machine and wash up so I didn't stink up my house. Hmmm... Talk about bringing your work home with you. Besides, my wife threatened to hose me off in the back yard if I didn't do something about the odor I brought home with me.

Let me go back about two months, to the beginning of the summer, and the beginning of my "rise to power."

Chapter 1 »