My friend Katie told me about how satisfying it was for her to tell her boss to ‘take this job and shove it’. After she did that she moved as far away from me as she could possibly get and still be in the United States. I’m not sure what to think about that . . .
Katie told me her husband Troy got the same delight from telling his superiors to cram their job up their backsides. He was in the lumber business, like me. Unlike me, he liked his job and was loyal, but businesses being what they are, with shifts in policies and changes in upper management, he began to feel like nothing more than a seat filler. Nothing special: we can get another one just like you for less money. This seems to be the prevailing mentality everywhere in this country.
Our conversation reminded me of this guy I worked with at Johnny on the Spot. Yes, the portable toilet company.
I went to work there because the pay was amazing and my wife wanted to be a stay at home mommy. If I had to suck shit so she could stay at home and raise our babies, I would do it.
This particular Johnny on the Spot was a franchise owned by Deffenbaugh. Since I already worked for Deffenbaugh as a trash truck driver, going to work at JOTS was just a transfer away.
Everyone had something to say about my new job. Having been a trash man for a very long time, I expected ridicule. I was used to it. Hell, the dispatcher at JOTS called us her ‘turd herders’. The boss told me, “If you don’t take a lotta shit at this job, then ya ain’t doin’ it right.” He had a bumper sticker on his office wall that said, “Your shit is our bread and butter.” Another one that said, “Number 1 in the number 2 business.”
It took a while to be good humored about it. I had to learn never to look at cars going down the road while I was driving because kids would hold their noses and wave a hand in front of their face.
I couldn’t go anywhere near a school bus.
At Thanksgiving my father-in-law asked me where my route was located. I was pretty lucky. My Monday route started in Fairway Kansas on the north side and each day went further south down state line through Mission Hills, Prairie Village and Leawood. They were nice neighborhoods filled with tree lined streets, parks, poodles and million dollar McMansions.
“That’s okay then,” he said, and went back to shoveling food in his mouth.
“Whaddya mean, ‘that’s okay then,’?” I asked.
“Cause their shit don’t stink,” he said.
He had a point, but I think it was a metaphorical one: he was wrong about the odoriferous quality of their scat.
On a normal day my route consisted of construction sites and parks. The ‘pots’ as we called them, were there for the convenience of people building stuff, but there were special events that required dozens, even hundreds of ‘units’, which is what we also called portable toilets.
Johnny on the Spot had about a dozen drivers with nicknames like Izzy, the Potty Mouse and the Walrus.
But there was only one Carl.
Carl was the prep guy.
Carl was the guy that prepared those dozens or hundreds of terlets (which is what I personally called them) for delivery. He’d been doing it long enough that he knew when an event was coming and he’d go up the hill and around the bend where the additional units were stored until they were needed and bring enough down to cover the aforementioned event.
The day before an event: an air show, SantaCaliGon or some such, there would be the right number of units standing shoulder to shoulder down the entrance road, like soldiers at attention, ready to receive your festival doody.
Like most people who are good at their jobs, Carl was an @$$hole. He didn’t know how to shoot the breeze. Jokes hit his ear and fell flat on the ground.
Carl had a helper. He was an old guy that would sneak drinks from a flask all day long. Carl didn’t like him. Carl didn’t like anybody.
Carl’s helper would stand near him until Carl told him to do something, then he was all asshole and elbows. When he finished he’d come back to Carl for his next instruction. Singular. You couldn’t give Carl’s helper two tasks or he’d get lost.
It came to Carl’s attention that the people Deffenbaugh hired as ‘forklift’ drivers were being paid $12 dollars an hour. Carl was getting $10 an hour and he had more responsibilities than the forklift drivers down the hill did.
Carl went to the boss and told him about his discovery. Carl said, “I want $12 an hour.”
The boss, we’ll call him Chet, used to be a salesman. He had survived the upheaval that had occurred at Johnny a few years before. A time or two, he was the only one on site to answer phones after everyone else had quit. Apparently this qualified him to be the manager.
If you know anything about salesmen that transition to management, they expect a lot of lips to buttocks contact. Subordinate to superior ass kissing. Especially if they were a salesman for a long time, like Chet was. As a salesman they spent so much time kissing the backsides of everyone they met, just to put groceries in the pantry, that, when they get the tiniest whiff of power, the tables turn.
Carl didn’t have a chance and he knew it.
Chet was not positively disposed to Carl’s inability to pucker and offered him a ten cent an hour raise.
Carl gave Chet a month’s notice.
The week after Carl quit Chet started asking for volunteers to work the upcoming festival. There would be one crew that delivered the ‘units’, another that serviced them and another one that drove the big pumper for the final ‘service’ and a crew to pick up the ‘pots’.
But I had noticed something unusual. There was no line of freshly spruced ‘units’ standing shoulder to shoulder on the entrance road. I raised my hand and told him so.
Carl’s helper was sought. We found him asleep in the storage room upstairs. In fact, no one remembered seeing him all week long. We suspected that that’s how he’d spent the entire week after Carl left.
We never saw him again.
Chet had a dilemma on his hands. He had a festival coming up in a few days and he needed fifty units that he could deliver.
We drivers could have helped him, but we all got paid by the pot. He offered us $10 an hour to bring units down, pressure wash them and prepare them for delivery, but no one took him up on it. We all made double that working our routes. Besides, the only time we had to do it was after we’d done our day's work. We’d be too tired.
Besides, no one liked Chet. He was a salesman turned manager and demanded respect from people who actually worked for a living.
Chet begged Ron Deffenbaugh, the owner of the company, for help. He needed warm bodies. Mr. Deffenbaugh sent four men, imported from south of the border, up the hill. They were good natured men who understood no English. If you wanted them to do something, you had to do it first so they would know how. If there was nothing to do they would just stand and look around or all pile into Chet’s office looking for their next assignment.
Chet needed someone to keep the guys moving and someone who could drag a trailer up the hill to bring down units to prepare.
Chet forced the job on a guy who didn’t want it. The guy, whom I’ll call Terry, ran the sign shop. You know those signs you see with ‘Road Closed,’ on them? Most of the time they are rented from little companies that bring them out, set them up and then come get them when you are finished with them. Terry was the one and only employee of Deffenbaugh’s sign company.
Chet shoved the job onto him because Terry’s office was above Johnny on the Spot’s office, and his leg straightener was right next to the wash bay where the ‘units’ were all cleaned and Chet could see Terry out there by the ‘pots’ all the time.
Terry was already paid $12 dollars an hour to run the sign company and it appeared to Chet that he didn’t do much for that money. Mr. Deffenbaugh granted Terry an additional $2 an hour, bringing him up to $14 an hour, for managing the JOTS operations, over Chet’s objections.
Chet’s objections were a burr under Terry’s saddle from the get go.
Because Terry also had sign work to do, most of what he did for JOTS was bring down units to be prepped and settle the amigos into working on them. Then he’d load up a bunch of signs on his flatbed truck and drive away.
While Terry was away the amigos would go to Chet for their next assignment, which he literally had to show them how to do if it was something someone hadn’t shown them how to do before. And he had no clue what they already knew how to do.
Chet decided that they needed all-the-time on-site supervision. Mr. Deffenbaugh gave Chet permission to hire someone from a half-way house. A half-way house is where convicted felons, who spent time in the big house, go in order to transition from prison back into society.
Chet hired a guy named Frank. Chet loved him because Frank fell all over himself trying to kiss Chet’s ass. Frank was useless though, because, like the amigos, he had to be shown how to do everything, on top of the fact that he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish.
Frank was like a sheep dog. If he needed the amigos to go somewhere he’d bark and wave his arms. The only advantage that Frank had over the amigos was that he understood what Terry or Chet were saying.
It was obvious that Frank couldn’t move his underlings fast enough to keep up, so another guy named Frank was hired to work nights with another four amigos that couldn’t speak English.
New Frank would get his amigos going and, after all the drivers, dispatcher, Terry and Chet went home, would take a JOTS pickup truck somewhere offsite. No one knew what he was doing when he was gone. Since he wasn’t there to give the amigos something else to do, we would find them asleep in our trucks.
We were all surprised that Chet didn’t fire new Frank. All Chet did was lock away the keys to the trucks.
After a month or so, Chet found that his eight amigos, two half-way house employees and Terry just couldn’t keep up with the summer demands of a portable toilet company. Mr. Deffenbaugh gave him eight more Mexicans: four more for days and four more for nights.
To make an incredibly long and convoluted story shorter, Chet went looking for Carl to offer him his job back.
Carl had set himself up as a locksmith. Lock your keys in your car, you called Carl and he’d get you back in. Lock yourself out of your house, he could help you with that too. Need an extra set of keys?
You get the picture.
It was the perfect job for Carl because no one expected their locksmith to be a nice guy, just really good at his job.
It was a shock to Chet’s system when Carl didn’t burst into tears at the offer of $12 dollars an hour to come back. After all, Carl came to him asking for a full 20% bump in pay and now Chet was willing to give it to him.
Carl did come back to Johnny on the spot but he made it clear to all of us that he made a lot more than Terry did for running the sign company and the Johnny operations. Terry was making $14 an hour.
The last time I saw Carl before I left Johnny on the Spot for greener pastures, he was sitting on a folding chair in the wash bay, doing nothing. I asked him what he was doing. He said, “I’m not the boss. I’m waiting for Terry to tell me what to do next.” Terry was out, delivering signs.
Carl’s job had been whittled down to ‘instructor’ and ‘keeper of the calender’. He showed the two Franks how to do stuff and they passed it on to their amigos. He told Terry how many and when to bring units down the hill, because Terry was still the boss of operations: a job he’d grown to like. When there was nothing for Carl to do, he did nothing.
I know it seems like an exaggeration, but when I started working at JOTS there were two guys doing unit prep and a year later there were twenty. Eight amigos on the day-shift and eight on the night, one supervisor per shift and Terry as the manager. Carl was the cherry on top.
Johnny on the Spot had turned into this huge operation during the course of a year because Carl had asked to be paid what the forklift drivers down the hill were being paid when they were hired on.
As a driver I would find empty Corona bottles in my truck. When I went to restock my supply of toilet paper I would find several guys hanging out and sometimes sleeping in the store room. Ironically, I could never get into the bathroom to use the toilet because there were so many people working in the building: there was always someone in there.
The Potty Mouse, the Walrus and I, and a guy I called, ‘Kneel’ for his ability to perform verbal fellatio on Chet in front of everyone, wondered aloud at how a small operation had turned into such a Rube Goldberg invention.
