George,

You had me going there for a second with the 15,000 protestors [participating in the demonstration at Taco Bell]. I was wondering what you were smoking this morning.

It did remind of a summer job I had between my 2nd and 3rd years of college laying reinforcing steel when they were building Interstate 64. As there wasn't a lot of intellectual component to the job we tried to come up with ways to amuse ourselves.

One day we decided to figure out how much we were getting paid per ton to lay this steel (all manual labor). It was under $0.10 a ton. The big difference is that we were mostly college students and knew were weren't going to be doing it forever. I was however in the best shape of my life. I didn't have any social life though because I weas usually wiped out after carrying "rebar" for 10 to 12 hours.

Downing Smith (electronic mail, April 19, 2002)