[Hoot Gibson]

that's my point trying to get hoot to understand if you started working in the
mines at 18 it's pretty hard to work 47 years underground your body wears out
it's not like working behind a desk

What makes you think that I don't understand how hard working in an underground mine is? I once worked in an underground mine in Logan County in a 20 ft. thick seam of coal, but most of the time that I spend underground was in Martin, Floyd, Knott, and Pike Counties. When coal got too thin for lessees to mine, I had to go underground to confirm the conditions. I often measured coal that was less than 28 inches thick - too thin to roof bolt. I did not have to crawl around in low coal for 8 hours a day, but I crawled enough to appreciate how difficult an environment a coal mine in 30 inch coal is.

I spent a summer working as an underground general laborer on the third shift and then going to an 8 AM summer calculus class. Work in a mine does not get any harder than carrying rock dust all night long after some idiot with seniority gets the supply scoop buried in the mud or building cribs and setting timbers after a roof fall buries the track where you had been traveling every night.

It did not take me long working underground to realize that I had no intention of retiring there. You had to have known how tough underground mining is on the body as a man gets older. It is never too late to switch careers to one more suitable for somebody in their fifties or sixties.

Sitting at a desk all day long is not as easy as you seem to think either. Today, I worked from 6:30 AM to 8:30 PM - taking about 20 minutes for lunch (at my desk) and nothing but short restroom breaks the rest of the day. But if I did not enjoy what I was doing, I would be doing working toward doing something else, not whining about how tough I have it. People are not designed to do hard physical labor their entire lives. At some point, we need to adapt and begin earning money based on our knowledge and experience instead of our muscles.