I now cover four plants instead of eleven — two in Maricopa County, one in Yuma, one in Casa Grande — and I am a maintenance supervisor rather than a regional one, and my base went from ninety-four thousand to eighty thousand, and I lost the travel per diem, which was real money and which I had been quietly treating as income for six years.

I am away about forty nights a year now instead of a hundred and eighty.

Forty, not none.

There is no job in industrial maintenance at my level with no nights in it and I looked at nine of them.

And here is the part I have to put in.

Between the twelfth of September and the following June, while I was waiting for that transfer, I took two trips I did not have to take.

One to Tulare in the November for four nights, which somebody else could have covered and offered to.