The gut-wagon

Not sure where this lurch down memory lane originated, but I got to thinking about knocking around in the Guelph-Cambridge-KW neighbourhood back in the seventies. That's when southern Ontario was still an industrial powerhouse. Decent jobs were abundant.

By decent, I mean a guy working in any of the unionized manufacturing plants, and even most of the non-union ones, could afford a house and a car and a vacation now and then. Unfortunately, we took it all for granted and it's long gone.

Most of those places had cafeterias, but quite often the cafeteria was only open during the day shift. If you happened to work second shift, which would typically look like 4 till midnight or something like that, you were out of luck.

There were often good reasons to work second shift, aside from the shift premium. In my case, as a welder, things got pretty dodgy in mid-July when the temperature outside was 90. I've never in my life seen such a thing as an air-conditioned welding shop, so second shift was the way to go.

If the cafeteria was closed, and you lacked the foresight to pack a lunch, you were left to scrabble for whatever was on offer when the gut-wagon pulled into the parking lot at lunch-time. That might not have been at the beginning of lunch, because these guys had to rush around to different worksites that shared the same half hour lunch slot. 

The fare from these mobile lunchrooms wasn't that great. You typically had a selection of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, subs, and donuts. If you wanted a hot meal there was burgers that were cooked up six hours beforehand and had been marinating under a heat lamp ever since. For drinks you could have a coffee or a canned pop. Bottled water hadn't been invented yet.

The folks who ran these trucks, and they were quite often women, had an enviable mark-up on their goods, but I often wondered what kind of living they really made. The more savvy ones would supplement their income with a weed sideline or maybe a can of beer instead of a can of pop for the right people, but I doubt they made as much as their customers.

They did have one great advantage, though. At the end of lunch, they drove away.

I had to go back to work.