If you’ve never had the pleasure of using Fiberlume, you’ll need a time machine to rectify that. Fiberlume, you see, was a “reflective asphalt based aluminum coating in the nature of a paint for metal roofs or buildings,” according to the page on its canceled trademark. In practice, the coating in the form of a paint was used to patch leaky mobile homes. That’s not what I used it for though.
Instead, I used it, alongside my coworker in the maintenance department, to cover the non-metal roof of the factory at which we worked. The large flat surface didn’t do well in the heat, humidity, and rain of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, so my coworker and I spent a large portion of our summer job going back and forth across the roof applying and reapplying Fiberlume as it cracked and started leaking again.
The reason for this approach was likely the fact that our jobs were temporary ones designed for young men getting ready for college rather than being truly necessary. There’s also the possibility that the budget didn’t allow for adding what the factory truly needed — a sloped roof.
In either case, we’d arrive in the morning, mix up the Fiberlume — which separated in the five-gallon buckets it came in — climb the ladder to the roof, haul the buckets up by hand using a rope, and then get to spreading. I still have scars on my legs from times when the sharp edges of the buckets caught me as I was pulling them up. It was silly, but time consuming and not as miserable as the day when they truly had nothing for us to do and sent us out to level the gravel on the walking trail that had been built for employees of the factory…
The Federalist 
