Cletus and Zeke in Whitefield, Oklahoma

Zeke and Cletus were working at an industrial construction site outside of Whitefield, Oklahoma.

A Korean concern was building a factory to make automotive components: headlights, taillights, brake calipers and such. The firm had milked regional and state incentives and subsidies into the eleventh hour and construction was behind schedule.

Zeke was driving a dump truck and Cletus was driving a Bobcat, spreading fill.

Recent shifts in electoral patterns had emboldened progressive regulators and they had driven Equal Employment Opportunity initiatives into the tiniest subset of victim. A mathematician would have suggested that they had discovered -1^(1/2), that is, found imaginary numbers.

Consequently, otherwise marginally qualified job candidates found themselves in positions beyond their ability.

One of those positions involved traffic control of the dump trucks.

The controller was screaming at Zeke to get out of the dump zone the second he had finished his spread. Zeke did not mind working fast, but he was uncomfortable when it was somebody he had never worked with before.

One of the unspoken rules was to trust your ground-spotter. They have a better perspective than you do.

Zeke hammered the throttle as he was lowering the hopper of his truck.

He never saw the pipe-and-electrical trestle that brought utilities and industrial chemicals into the plant. The hopper and accelerating truck ripped them out of the ground and set construction back two weeks.

Zeke was fired. The traffic director was moved to an inside job.

Cletus picked up forty hours of overtime a week. Zeke caught the biggest catfish of his life during his enforced vacation and fell in love with waitresses calling him "Darlin' "

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