The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

above the windows, under the very roof, there hung a large electrical round clock like those at the railway stations. From time to time, the peaceful slumber of the timepiece got perturbed with a sudden "tick!" which made the half-meter long hand jump for two-three minutes at once and there fall asleep again until the next "tick!".

The third wall had the same five-meter-tall windows. Next to the right-hand border-crossing from the Mechanical Shop Floor, there stood a drilling machine for anyone who felt like using it. Then came the steel-topped acres of the marker's table and, in the corner behind the tracks of the dead-end, the lathe with its turner.

Along the central axis in the Repair Shop Floor, there stood another long workbench or rather two of them abutting each other face-to-face, with an iron-mesh partition in between. Common-sense-based safety rules, if you think of it: had a hammer slipped out of grip, the mesh would prevent knocking out a workman at the opposite workbench.

Walking the Repair Shop Floor, you had to watch your step carefully to safely navigate between giant worm gears, oil-smeared casings, and other whatnots strewn indiscriminately upon the floor. Those things, brought by dolly-cars and dropped at vacant spots a couple of months before, were waiting patiently for the due attention because there always popped up something else, more pressing for urgent repair. But that was not our concern. We were the Experimental Unit by the Repair Shop Floor, sited at the workbench next to the Overseers’ Nest.

No, we did not meddle with repair, our task was to implement the projects experimentally drawn at the Design Bureau in the Plant Management building, to endow them with the real-life forms of metal constructions. The handcart of four wheels, for example, or the stand "Glory to Labor!" to be placed in front of Main Check-Entrance to the Plant. Or all kinds of bearing constructions made of solid rolled-steel channels and joists, like, brackets, pillars, roof trusses.

However, for so bulky products there was no room at the Repair Shop Floor and we assembled them under the open sky outside, on the rack-deck between the welder's booth by the sideway gate and the window of the locker room. By the by, the parts for the city TV tower were also constructed on that rack-deck, and then the team of workers from our Experimental Unit assembled the tower at its site. But that was before me…

For the initial three months, I was a locksmith apprentice couched by Peter Khomenko. For him, it was a good news because a locksmith's wages somewhat increased when he was in charge of training a newbie. On the other hand, Peter was not sure what else to do about his apprentice, after he handed me a spare key from his toolbox in the workbench under his vise, so that I could keep there my hammer, chisel, and file they handed me at the Tool Shop Floor. Okay, he showed how to produce a scratcher out a throwaway length of thin steel wire to draw marks on a sheet of iron but now what?

Along all our line of vises by the Overseers’ Nest, a workman at work was a completely rare sight. Unless at the end of the working day when someone was tinkering up some kind of shabashka for household needs at his khutta.

Nevertheless, the entire workforce was principally always busy. A couple of locksmiths pottering with the welder at the mainstay props outside the locker room window. Some went to dismantle the roller table in the Foundry Shop Floor. Another group was led by Senior Oversee to the Boiler Shop Floor to install four anchor bolts for a jib crane under the construction there. In general and on the whole, the work was running high. Somewhere… If not at one, then at the other place… Maybe.

The managers of the Repair Shop Floor were doing their work in the office upstairs even though the CEO of the Repair Shop Floor, Lebedev, visited the premises no oftener than two times a day. Where he worked before and after those visits I had no idea.

He wore a black greatcoat of the railwaymen uniform. In summer, of course, it was swapped for a jacket of that same uniform with silver-colored buttons. At walking, the CEO’s back was held so plumb upright that it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the man’s being in a well-befogged state already. However, even though his front side could betray the fact of Lebedev's being drunk as a fiddler, he never stumbled the slightest bit. No, never. The workers respected him, probably, for his never staying in the office longer than for five-ten minutes.

In the table of ranks, the CEO was followed by Managers of the Units by the Repair Shop Floor. The Repair Unit was headed by Manager Mozgovoy, whose thin falsetto somehow did not fit his portly frame, still, he also was respected for his being harmless.

Once at the Repair Unit, they were restoring the concavity profile of some bulky incomprehensible thing. Whoever you asked what the crap was that thing, the answer was invariably uniform, "Who the fuck knows what hooey it is." And even that "hooey" was pronounced identically, almost in a howl, like, "…hooooey it is."

So for half of a month, they kept scraping that concavity in turns. Whoever got tired of doing nothing took the hand scraper and commenced to scrape. Eventually, it got polished to a mirror shine and another hooey (the convex thing) began to freely enter and rotate, back and forth, inside the scraped one. Mozgovoy, sure thing, was delighted by such a labor achievement at his Section…

Well, now, locksmith Lekha from the Podlipnoye village, freshly after his army service, in the end of a working day puts a chisel at the shiny surface of the polished hooey and asks, with the hammer raised to his shoulder, "Look here, Mozgovoy, wanna me fuck the fucker?"

In a wistful, tired falsetto, Mozgovoy responded, "If you