@chai2,
I often wonder that society functions at all with all the messed up people in it.
When I got promoted to lead maintenance, they hired a new man to assist who had almost equal maintenance skills. He was good in other fields where I am weak, such as auto mechanics and machinist. For three years he was mostly great. Then we got a new manager. She was married but fell in love with (let's call him) Jake. After knowing her a spell, Jake insinuated himself into the office, where he and she and the assistant to the manager visited most of the day. My complaints fell on deaf ears.
This manager truly wanted to keep the apartments full, but had no real knack for the job. We sank from 90+ occupancy to about 70% in the space of a year. Jake was supposed to make ready the vacancies, but continued to sit in the office. Eventually we had about a third empty apts and none made ready. I would have helped Jake when caught up on my duties, but refused to do it while he loafed.
Eventually the owners came to their senses enough to fire the manager. The new manager was the best boss I ever had. But Jake and the assistant manager, as well as the fired manager, did their best to sabotage her. I saw this right away and gave her the help the others refused. This manager began leasing apartments from the first. When Jake told me, "I will sit in the office any time I want to," I silently figured, "We'll see about that."
The manager chased him out when he tried it.
The fired manager was allowed to reside in her apartment, against company policy. From there she conspired with the idiot staff members to undermine the manager. Eventually it came to a head and all three of them were expelled from the property.
Jake when he first arrived had frightened me. He showed me his gun collection and spoke of contributing to David Duke. He kept a close eye on black residents until he found them breaking rules and they were made to move. I complained but it did no good. He decided that all the outdoor faucets should not have keys. I felt they should. It was like a minor war with me putting them on and him taking them off. Like everything else between us I got no support from the office. I noticed that when his wife would be away he ate only bologna because he thought it a good way to lose weight. After he ditched his wife and after he moved, he ate nothing but bologna for months at a time. When eventually he fell down dead on his floor, I figured it was the bologna that caused it. He had severe heart disease and cancer of the liver, the autopsy revealed.
I had experience with shingle type roofing. A brother learned to rent a tar pot and work on flat roofs. He asked me to help him patch a roof one time and I went along to haul up buckets of tar from a 500 degree pot. The spot of the leak made up a depression with a pool of water in it. The gravel that covered the rest of the roof was absent here. I knew without being told that the water had to be mopped away and the surface either allowed to dry or else be cut out and filled back in. My brother said with authority that the hot tar would boil out the water. He mopped a patch of felt paper over the puddle. When he was finished I stood back and didn't dare examine it. After a short time the building owner and a man I was to learn to be a Gypsy came up to have a look. The owner walked straight up to the patch and raked a foot across the patch. The whole thing slid over the water. While my brother and the owner talked, the Gypsy stood by me. "I don't care if you **** on it," he said. "But it should at least hold up until after we get paid." We went home in disgrace that day. I don't know if my brother went back and made it right or if he took the loss and moved on.
@edgarblythe,
When I first read hot tar and water I was thinking there was going to be some kind of explosion reaction when the 2 met.
I'm glad that didn't happen at least.
@chai2,
The same brother once asked me to mop an entire roof with felt paper over a thick layer of gravel. I don't think it would have been possible to get an entire coat of it on there. For certain it would have been a disaster no matter how you look at it. I didn't know about the gravel until I drove there ready to work. I met the owner and talked to him for a few minutes. We mutually canceled the job. I didn't fall for any more of my brother's schemes.
We were building shell houses in Crystal City, with my grandfather as the boss and my oldest brother and I working with Mexican locals. I did my best, as always, but my grandfather never really thought much of my efforts. I was leaning over from the top of a house frame with a board he handed me. I don't recall if it was fascia or something else. I moved it according to his specifications and when he told me to I nailed it that way. From my view I could not see the result. The builder's rep came along and told Grandpa to take it down and make it straight. I heard him shovel blame on me and tell him I was not to be allowed to work on those things anymore. For three weeks he underpaid us. A gossipy fellow carpenter began going between us and Grandpa and feeding each side the most damaging takes he could ferret, until we brothers became discouraged and Grandpa was saying self defensive things about us. I was young and had worked really hard. It hurt me that he never paid us what he owed. When we went home to spend some days, my brother and I told him we quit. He still didn't give us our money, but he attempted to be playful with me. I turned away, too hurt to respond. He took it to heart and for the rest of his life bad mouthed me and slighted me, even when I tried to mend fences.
Not all of the maintenance people I worked beside were men. One very special woman would work beside me for eight hours, then go home and play soccer. I don't know how she did it. Together we rebuilt some long sections of wooden fence about the property. She could do the work orders as well as me and was actually a bit better schooled. We never gave each other static. She was a temp. I hated when they hired a permanent lead man and she had to leave. When she overheard the pay, she said she would have applied for the job if she had known. The last time I saw her she was nursing a wound, because one of the soccer people kicked her ankle. As luck would have it, the new guy was the kind of screw up that was fired within about four months.
When I arrived in Manhattan I had enough money to keep me going perhaps two weeks. My experience with Manpower temp service in Kansas City taught me that survival and getting on one's feet could begin there. I walked in intending to ask if they had an information sheet to fill out. The turd behind the window chewed me out and told me to sit on the bench. I sat facing the rear wall. After about fifteen minutes a man approached from the side. "Would you like some work?" he said.
Turned out he chose me because of the way I was sitting. He had a truck that had once belonged to the post office. His ads in the Village Voice got people in need of his truck to rent his services and for an additional fee he loaded and unloaded the truck. He needed me for those times, which were I learned the norm.
Our job that day was transferring a woman's apartment from one building in Queens to Manhattan. As we carried her feminine items from building to truck I noticed that two men were smirking from the side. I enjoyed their surprise when at the end the woman came out with us for the ride to her new digs.
On one occasion we did a job for a pair of acting teachers. One of them tried to recruit me for the classes, but that didn't happen. He told me he was Lee Van Cleef's very first teacher. He said Lee had hoped to replace Humphrey Bogart with his career after Bogart's death.
The man I worked for was from the West Indies. He had ended in NYC after his mother ran away with the man she married, escaping ethnic profiling. In their home town it was considered bad taste to marry one with dark skin and this man's father had very dark skin. When I met his mother, she had a whiter epidermis than me, but she was considered a black.
He was militant in these days of the 60s and he wanted me to see what it was all about. It was he that got me a seat on a chartered bus with Jesse Jackson, Flo Kennedy, and some other high profile civil rights demonstrators.
The man had a flaw that made it difficult for me to continue working. He invariably asked new customers their Zodiac sign. He then seethed throughout the time working for them. He would stare through hooded eyes and say to me, "That one's no good."
So after a time I went back to looking for a stable job.
I went back to Manpower and was promptly sent to work ironing uniforms at Schraft's. After a few days, Schraft's hired me full time. I became a Teamster. The fellow working nearest to me was also from Manpower. He was looking for a roommate. So I began the days of commuting to Manhattan from Brooklyn.
My new roommate moved on from Schraft's so I only saw him evenings. Turns out the family he introduced me to across the street had a mother from Texas. Her daughter told me later that they assumed I had moved in for a gay relationship. I don't know to this day why, because he spent his free time with a woman who was his fiancé, and they knew it.
I was doing well at my job, until one morning I felt too sick to go to work. I brought a doctor's note the following day, but I had already been fired. As I waited in a hall to receive my final check a union representative stopped to have a word. "I brought this doctor's note," I said. The rep took the note inside the office and within two minutes I was sent back to my job. I felt enough anger at the boss of the floor that I transferred to the department shipping out food to the restaurants.
We were a pretty good ethnic mix in both departments. One Irishman, who discussed the folk music scene with me, won a large sum playing the numbers and left. Another Irishman decided I was a "queer" and took a dislike to me. He was house-huge and nearly took a swing at me, until a few people rushed in to walk him back. He determined my sexual orientation based on a few mannerisms that actually came out of a rough childhood combined with Asperger's. After that, when he would see me he would keep a distance but smirked at me. I learned to ignore him.
One item we moved lots of at Schraft's was corned beef. Once I dropped a brisket of it. My coworker sent it anyway. She advised that it would otherwise have been fed to us in the cafeteria. I should have stood up to her, but I didn't.
Eventually I left there because of trouble at home. So I gathered up my stuff and hailed a cab. The driver was a whiner, who squeaked out the word, "Tip," as I counted out the money. I gave him less than I had first intended. A few days later, I was back in Corpus Christi, a place I had been running from for years.
Shortly after I got out of bed one morning, my back was in pain so fierce that I was considering the emergency room. Before I made that decision, the pain ebbed somewhat. I called in to say I could not work. The next morning, it only hurt a little, but I felt that another day of rest was necessary. I was unsure but not wanting to chance further injury. When I called in I was ordered to bring a doctor's note when I returned. So I called every doctor my insurance named. The words "back pain" were met with, "We have no appointments open." By this time the pain was totally gone and I felt fine. I called a doctor in Tomball who was not approved and paid him to tell me it likely was muscle strain and to write me a work release. In and out in ten minutes. Money needlessly spent.
