Great Ideas

When you get to know someone well you get to know their quirks. No matter how boring someone is on a daily basis you can nail them with one defining feature. It might be the way they laugh, or an overused phrase.

I told my buddy Rob that I had learned how to draw. I had him stand in front of me while I busily scratched a pencil on a pad, looking up at his face from time to time. I had drawn a smiley face with a line angling across the forehead that looked suspiciously like the one on Rob’s forehead. His girlfriend Lisa thought it was hilarious but didn’t want to laugh in front of him.

My defining feature was an overused phrase. I overheard someone imitating me by saying, “You know what you oughta do . . .” The person they were talking to threw their head back and laughed. Apparently I said that a lot.

“You know what you oughta do . . .”

I was walking towards my boss, Kevin Miller, while he was talking to the mechanic. When Kevin saw me coming he turned to Larry and said, loud enough that I could hear it, “Watch this.”

When I got close enough for conversation Kevin said, “What would you do about this?” He pointed to wires attached to the back of a halogen lamp. The lamp was fastened to a square steel rod. Larry had made a sliding lamp mount and couldn’t figure out how to keep the wires from just dangling off the back of the lamp. The screws weren’t meant to hold the weight of a thick cord. Eventually it would fall off.

Without missing a beat I said, “Extend the lamp as high as you can and use zip ties to hold the wire to the bottom piece.”

Kevin looked at Larry with a big, shit eating grin on his face and said, “See, told ya.”

It was odd to be made fun of for something I was good at. I mean, it seemed like they were making fun of me. I was confused.

My dad did the same thing. When I was a kid he handed me his watch. The band had come apart. It was a stretch band, made of multiple spring loaded links. There were small flat pieces of metal that held the links together. One of them had broken. So I removed the broken link and reassembled the watch band.

Dad was sitting outside on a lawn chair smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and shoot’n the shit with several of the men in the neighborhood, who had their own lawn chairs and their own cans of beer.

“Thanks boy,” he said and stretched the watch back onto his wrist. The other men expressed amazement. Apparently none of them thought I could fix the watch band, but my dad told them I could. He didn’t seem proud of it.

Miller Disposal’s trucks were all painted red with gold stripes, exactly like the trucks Joe’s Trash service used: a competitor the next town over. The only way you could tell the difference between a Miller roll-off truck and a Joe's roll-off truck was the color of the box it was carrying. Joe's were black and Miller’s were green; the same color green as Deffendum’s roll-off boxes.

I told Kevin, “from a distance we look like Joe's roll-off truck is stealing one of Deffendum’s roll-off boxes.” 

I couldn’t help throwing out ideas to improve the business. It was in my nature to see patterns and think of better ways to do things. I didn’t care if I was paid when Kevin used one of my ideas, I only wanted to see it working. I wanted Kevin to take my idea, that I got from seeing Deffendum's roll-off containers, and implement it on his. It was a great idea, worthy of stealing.

I told Kevin, “the difference between us and Deffendum is that Deffendum paints his name real big down the side. Our containers have a sticker the size of a sheet of paper plastered to the side of it. I can read the word Deffendum on a roll-off container from a mile away. I can even remember the phone number because I’ve seen it so many times.”

Kevin must have thought it was a good idea because he had Curly put a roll-off container in the shop. He didn’t pay him to do it. I didn’t have to ask Curly, I knew Kevin never paid him for the extra things he did.

I saw Kevin in the shop doing something on the side of the container. As I got closer I heard him bitterly complaining.

Kevin was holding a stencil against the steel wall of the container and spraying white paint at it. It was a little breezy and he got paint on his hands and was spackling the container as well. There were white dots all around the stencil.

I knew Kevin well enough to know he wouldn’t ask me for help, but the answer popped into my head, so I looked around for a box. I found one with a few bottles of antifreeze in it, took them out and handed the box to Kevin.

In the past I would have waited for Kevin to ask me what he was supposed to do with it, but I was tired of that game.

“Cut out the bottom with a box knife and tape the stencil to it,” I said.

What pissed him off is that I wouldn’t hint around until he figured it out himself, so he could say he came up with the idea. I never asked him to pay me for my ideas and I never acted like I was the boss. I even called him boss so he would understand that I had no ambition other than to drive a truck and draw a paycheck.

But I wanted credit for my ideas. They were mine.

I told him, “After you paint a letter on this side, move to the other side and paint another letter on that side so you don’t have to reapply the stencil when you’re done with this side. You can do the letters on both sides with one application.”

“I’m not a dumbass,” Kevin said.

I really didn’t think he was a dumbass but I know he thought I thought he was. Kevin was spoiled. He grew up in a house with a lot more money than mine. They paid people to cut the grass. His dad bought him a car and didn’t expect him to work until he got out of college.

Though I didn’t think Kevin was a dumbass if I hadn’t told him to paint the same letter on the other side of the box he would have spent all day applying and reapplying those stencils. I had a thing about efficiency.

Kevin and the mechanic used a forklift to put a trash compactor inside a roll-off box. It was going to be installed behind a grocery store, but they couldn’t figure out how to secure the machine inside the roll-off box while it was being transported. They had ratchet straps but the roll-off box had nothing to hook the ends of the strap to.

Kevin was expanding into trash compactor leases. He would buy the unit and lease it to a company that needed one. When he complained about the cost of having a third party deliver them I said, “Why don’t we deliver them?”

Kevin wouldn’t talk with me about the company anymore. He didn’t want me to come up with ideas that I wouldn’t allow him to take credit for. He wanted credit for everything.

Were we to have had a conversation about it I would have told him to buy or make a roll-off flat-bed that we could strap a compactor to. It would have a long flat strip of steel welded down the side that you could attach a strap hook to, just like on a flat bed trailer.

Kevin would take a piece of what I said and assume I meant something half baked that he would blame me for because it didn’t work. One time he even said, “I did exactly what you said!” He didn’t.

Since he’d taken part of my idea: hauling trash compactors with our trucks, and shoved a unit into a roll-off box, I knew I had to salvage the situation or he would blame me for something that didn’t work again.

“Just tack weld the feet of the compactor to the floor of the container,” I said. Neither of them acknowledged me. They just shook their heads when I was done speaking. “Let the installer know he’ll have to use an angle grinder to get it out.”

I knew if I didn’t tell Kevin to pass it along that the installer would need a grinder he would be scratching his head wondering how to get it out and Kevin would blame me.

Though Kevin didn’t acknowledge my idea of tack welding the feet of the compactor to the floor of the roll-off box, when I looked at it later it was welded in place.

They’d welded it halfway up inside the box. I would have told him to put it by the door, but I can only give him so much before I quit caring about the consequences. The trash compactor was going to have to be dumped out the back, which might damage it.

Kevin didn’t think my problem solving tricks were amusing anymore. He no longer enjoyed showing me off. I grew my hair long. Not to piss him off but because I liked wearing my hair long. He would make snarky comments about my long hair but he would never tell me I had to cut it.

Miller Disposal provided uniforms for us to wear. He paid for 5 pairs of pants and shirts to be washed once a week. He hadn’t thought it through because, when we’d turn in our uniforms on Friday we would have none to wear the next week. Typically a company that provided uniforms would order eleven sets. The eleventh set for when you had to turn over a week’s worth of dirty uniforms and pick up the next week’s.

Kevin’s solution was to quit paying for the cleaning service. That way we could wash them ourselves and not wait a week for the service to deliver our cleaned and pressed uniforms.

I thought the uniforms were dorky but it was less laundry for me when they were being cleaned. After Kevin quit paying to have them cleaned I quit wearing them. I preferred sweatpants and t-shirts. He complained and made fun of me but I was immune by then.

Kevin never quit wearing his uniform. We all suspected that he still paid to have his cleaned and pressed; that he just quit paying to have ours cleaned. Eventually he quit buying uniforms for the new hires. In the end he was the only one wearing a Miller Disposal uniform.

Curly Jones’s wardrobe rapidly devolved into holey shirts and pants that had been stitched up hundreds of times. Kevin complained bitterly about the clothes Curly wore. It was Curly’s one act of rebellion against Kevin. Curly loved having a clean, freshly pressed uniform to put on in the morning. It made him proud. If Kevin didn’t care anymore then Curly wasn’t going to pretend to care either.

The men who did well working at Miller Disposal had nothing to offer but servitude. They didn’t solve problems. They didn’t have ideas. They did what Kevin told them to do without question.-

I was burned out. I grew quiet. I no longer put forth any ideas. I was a ghost. When I got to work I would grab my route sheet and leave. I wouldn’t talk to anyone unless I was directly confronted or if it was business.

So I was surprised when Kevin gave me a jacket with Driver of the Year printed across the shoulder blades. Every year Kevin would dub a driver, “Driver of the Year.” I’d been at Miller Disposal for 4 years and knew I’d never win, so I was shocked. It was a decent looking jacket, but I was puzzled. Why me?

I asked Kevin and he said, “Because you don’t bitch, you just do your job.”

There it is. I’d finally been bent, broken and molded into exactly what Kevin wanted: seen but not heard. Service only, no smile required.