about the progress and reward

I just had a glass of water. The exact process by which I enjoyed such a simple delight included grabbing a lowball glass and pressing it against a tab embed in an electric fridge in my kitchen room. A light came up, and ice fell through a plastic chute into my glass.

My grandfather used to drink water, as all people do, when he was young. He rarely drunk cold water, but when he did, he chipped of ice from a several hundred kilograms heavy block of ice he worked seeding, cutting and transporting. His job included staying inside a bone-chilling room with almost no temperature protecting garments and moving and actioning machines that build a massive chunk of ice in the hot, clammy environment of coastal Tela, a little banana town in the Caribbean shore of a little banana republic in Central America. He stayed indoors for hours, listening to the deafening hum of the compressors, working near mortal perils including old pressure valves, humongous vats and defective railings.

Sometimes, when he break time came, he traded chips of ice for bread and Coke, each produced at two different factories next to the ice one he worked on. A hidden hole in the wire fence that divided them served the purpose. It was stealing, he confessed, but sometimes it was either trading or hunger. Such fancies as ice was a hard pleasure to come by, specially if you weren't an administrator of the banana plantation.

Other times, his job was delivering sections of the monolithic ice to wealthy people, shop owners and meat vendors across the city. This blocks weighed several pounds, and were, understandably, impossible to grab. Instead they used huge ice hooks to drag the block around. At the delivery places, they refilled aluminum-lined wooden boxes, freezers, with new ice, salted it, and moved on. Most people that owned a freezer didn't use ice chips to chill drinks, instead, they left the drinks to chill inside the freezer for enough time. Other people just drunk room temperature water.

Therefore, even though he had, at the time, a low paying menial job with terrible safety measures, he could enjoy ice chips frequently before most people in the town could. I just press my glass to a tab and it falls.

I truly believe his ice chips were more enjoyed.