Look for the Union Ice Cube
Ding!
The elevator doors parted on floor number nine as I journeyed to the tippy top floor of the Pfister. I gasped at the full reveal of the open doors because there, check before my heavily bespectacled eyes were two giants. Uh, excuse me, let me clarify that a bit. I mean two giants with impressive paws the size of baseball mitts wrapped around the handles of rolling coolers.
“Going up?” asked the first giant, viagra a skyscraper tall drink of water.
“You bet,” I said. “All the way to the top.”
“We’re going to 21…that’s where the ice machine is,” sniggered the second giant who was a little shorter and rounder. Not fat, per se. He just sort of looked like he could have crushed you a tad sooner than the first giant because he was a hair closer to the ground.
My powers of intuition suddenly snapped into action telling me that maybe, just maybe these two weren’t castaways from a Grimm fairy tale. Rippling arm muscles, necks as thick as my waist, black t-shirts with symbols that looked like cogs in a wheel, steel-toed boots, a braided beard on the first giant that looked like it could be used to teach sailors how to tie knots…these two towering figures hadn’t just climbed down a bean stalk. These were Union folk.
And, okay, I also might have just then noticed the note on the daily schedule of events posted in the elevator that said the Teamsters’ Local 200 was holding a big event at the hotel.
The coolers were a little bit of a curiosity to me. They were your standard issue Colemans, right proper at a tailgate or picnic, for sure. But around these parts you don’t often see a couple of sweet guys tied to organized labor who look like they could snap your neck and then do a master spot weld on it to fix you up riding the elevator ready to refrigerate a pound of ground chuck.
“What are you guys doing with the coolers?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, these” said the first giant looking down about four miles to see the coolers below. “Filling ‘em up.”
Giant, The Second tittered to his partner-in-chill. “Yeah, we gotten keep our juice cold.”
Ding!
The doors to the elevator parted again and the Union guys started their own two-person strike, coolers rolling softly behind them. It would have been hard to imagine a more light-footed pair of giants as I watched the boys twinkle toe off to fill their coolers with juice rocks. If all went right, I’m sure the International Brotherhood of So and So and This and That got to enjoy a couple of nice cups of ice cold juice at the end of a long day of meetings. And here’s hoping those juice cups were memorable for nice frosty heads and notes of roasted hops.
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