Payback and Food

I have had some really shitty bosses. My last two employers, while creating shitty working conditions and a bit of wage theft, weren’t even the worst of them. I had a boss once at an ambulance company who wouldn’t let us have food and water in the ambulance, and wouldn’t allow us to have meal breaks. His saying was “I don’t pay you to eat lunch, I pay you to transport patients.” His other (in)famous quote was, “The customer is always right. In our case, the customer is the nursing home, doctor’s office, or hospital that hires our service. It’s not the patients, the patients are cargo, and no one cares what cargo thinks.” He eventually got caught committing Medicare fraud and was forced to reimburse the government some of the money (about 25%) that the Feds accused him of stealing. Yeah, real nice guy.

It was that guy, more than most, who convinced me just how corrupt the government is, especially at the Federal level. It’s also about as rare as hair on a frog’s ass to see anyone get anything over on these kinds of people. It seems that crime DOES pay, if you are friends or coconspirators with the guys who decides what a crime is.

There was one boss that I really wound up getting a bit of payback, and it’s a great story. This was back in the late 90s, while my divorce was pending. I worked for a steel mill back then, and the steel mill went into bankruptcy. They made the announcement at quitting time. They told everyone to shut down the machines, stand in line, and clock out for the day. As you clocked out, they handed you your last check and told you whether or not you would still have a job. As the maintenance manager, I didn’t get laid off that round, but some of my employees did. Many of them complained that their checks were shorted.

One of the employees who got laid off was the girl in charge of the tool crib. It was her job to watch over the tools that employees could sign out, and ensure that the employee signing them out actually brought them back. There was some expensive stuff in there: welders, plasma cutters, some tool sets were thousands of dollars in value. Once she was gone, the employees who were left figured that those tools were free for the taking, and taking is exactly what happened.

A month later, it was my turn to be laid off. When they let me go, I was told that one of my employees would be taking over my job. He had been trying to get my job since I started there- even going so far as to sabotage things and then fix them quickly, pointing out that I wasn’t as good or as fast as he was. It’s easy to find the problem when you are the one who broke it. He would do things like move a wire in a control device from one terminal to another after taking all of the wire labels off. That was a tough thing to find. Trust me, this is important later.

Anyhow, they laid me off and claimed that since I was responsible for all of the tools that were now missing, I could consider that to be my last paycheck. I got screwed out of 2 grand or so.

A few months passed. In the meantime, I was homeless and really hurting for money. At this time, I was living in my car. I had a second job, picking up garbage after the Shamu show at Sea World. That paid less than $7 an hour. I bought a car at a “buy here, pay here.” I wasn’t eating much, I couldn’t afford it. I showered at work. As a perk of the job, the city allowed us to use the gym at the civic center for $20 per month. I joined so I could take showers at the gym. I worked out a lot because the gym was air conditioned.

One day, I got a call from the vice president. It went like this: “Dive, this is Stan.” Me: “What do you want?” Stan: “I have a problem, my number two line is down and Sonny can’t find the problem. I’m losing $2,000 an hour.” Me: “Yeah, you have a problem all right. It sucks to be you.”

Line two was a large pipe machine. It would take rolls of flat stainless steel and roll it into a tube. The ends of the steel would be welded together with a strong (50kw) microwave welder, then it would pass through a high frequency annealer that would heat the pipe using radio waves to temper the pipe. These things are fast- the high speed line was capable of making over 100 feet per minute of 1 inch stainless steel tubing. It’s all controlled by a microprocessor, and some of the electronics can be complicated. The pipe is pulled through the mill by a pair of 100 horsepower electric motors mounted on large transmissions.

So it turns out that I am pretty much the only guy in the entire state who knows how to repair stainless steel cold rolling machines with microwave welders. He is desperate. He practically begged me to come and help him. So, I told him that I would come and fix the machine for the 2 grand he owed me, any parts that were needed, plus a thousand bucks in a flat service fee, and I wanted the money in my hand before I would touch anything. He immediately replied, “Fine, as long as you are here within 90 minutes.” Damn, he didn’t hesitate, I must not have asked for enough.

So I was there in just over an hour, and it was an easy fix. He handed me $3000, I replaced a blown fuse, reset the microprocessor, and the machine started right up. Sonny was livid: “Demand your money back, he didn’t do shit. All he did was change a fuse and push two buttons! I could have done that!”

I looked at Sonny and replied: “So if you could do it, why didn’t you?” His answer was that he didn’t know which fuse to change. I laughed and said, “That’s what costs money- knowing which fuse to change and what buttons to push.”

That $3k really helped. It was two months’ pay at my other two jobs combined, and it was under the table money that the ex-wife couldn’t get her greedy fingers on.

Over the next year, I would get called over there to fix things from time to time. The charge was the same- $1000 per visit, flat charge, for up to two hours of work, then it was $250 per hour after that. I was working 3 or 4 days a month and making as much as I had been while I was working there full time. This gig helped me to be able to eat and eventually get an apartment with a roommate. I will admit that I did feel guilty at one point, and offered Stan a service contract where I would come out one day per week for $500 per week, plus emergency calls at $500 per visit. He said no.

One of the calls was because his eddy tester was broken. The plant had this eddy tester that you would run a pipe through, and it would test the integrity of the weld. The tester was connected to a PC with a proprietary expansion card. You can’t ship ISO certified welded pipe without it. Theirs was broken, and the company that made it charged portal to portal for service visits. It was expensive to have the factory guy come out, and he wouldn’t arrive for a couple of days.

I got there, and it turns out the motherboard of the PC was fried, but the expansion card and sensor was working. So I went to Stan and told him I would fix it that night, but it was going to cost him $5000. He paid it, and I fixed it by running home and grabbing my own PC to use as parts. The next day, I went and bought a new PC for only $1000. Some of my coworkers at the fire department told me I ripped him off by selling him a 2 year old PC for five times what it was worth. Whatever, he had a choice, and it still cost him less than it would have cost to have a factory guy come out, so I had no problems sleeping in the apartment I shared with my roommate.

The place finally shut down, but I got my money’s worth. The funniest part of the story was the two guys who owned the company went on to open another business a year later, and hired me to do some side work in their new place. I cut them a deal- I did the jobs for slightly less. One of those was putting a rotary phase converter into the place so he could run three phase motors on single phase power.

The extra cash I got from those guys was a big help when I needed it, and it was a bit of payback for how they screwed me on the way out.

This story is part of the reason why I get angry when the GenZ faggots tell me that I had it easy, and how hard their lives are now. Those blue haired commie idiots wouldn’t know hard knocks if it pushed a broomstick up their ass.