Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Cletus and Zeke in Huntsville, Alabama

Cletus and Zeke were in Huntsville, Alabama working on a construction site for a future metal stamping plant.

The press-pits were dug first and then footings were poured.

The site was considered a "brown-field" site. It had been used for various types of industry before. The EPA loved putting new industrial sites on old brown-fields rather than bulldozing productive habitat.

The issue with brown-field sites is that many of them dated back 150 years and the drawings were more artistic interpretations than drawings that reliable dimensions could be pulled from.

So it was no surprise to Cletus and Zeke when the backhoe ripped some piping out of the ground. The piping was not indicated on any of the drawings and it looked old. Very old. Much of it looked like clay tile.

At first the ends of the pipes wept. Then they seeped. The a rivulet came forth. Finally, they were all pouring into the press pit which was the size of an Olympic swimming pool.

It only took one whiff to determine that the outflow was raw sewage from somewhere.

Cletus and Zeke high-tailed it to the foreman's trailer. He was on his desktop computer and was staring intently at the screen.

"Go away." he commanded.

"Boss, we gotta problem." Zeke exclaimed.

"Go away. I have some critical paperwork that I gotta get finished by the end of the shift. Whatever it is it can wait to the next shift." the foreman said.

It is a common fallacy that members of management are any different than the run-of-the-row population. There are good ones and bad ones. Smart ones and stupid ones. Ones who care and ones with broken give-a-gollies.

And there were some who watched porn videos on company time, as evidenced by the reflection in the picture frame behind his desk.

Every hour, on the hour Zeke and Cletus went in to report how much the pool of raw sewage had risen in the press pit.

Each time Cletus and Zeke went into report, the foreman kicked them out of his office so he could work on his "paper work".

The second shift foreman came in a half hour early and swung through the construction site to see, first hand, how things were going. He blew a gasket.

The first shift foreman, who had seniority on the second shift guy, called Cletus and Zeke in and read them the riot act. Basically, the threw them under the bus.

While the second shift foreman and the first shift foreman had words outside the trailer, Cletus hopped over to the other side of the first shift foreman's desk and popped the "p" and the "q" key off the keyboard and swapped them. Seeing that he had a few seconds more time, he did the same for the "m" and "n" keys. Cletus had seen that the foreman was a hunt-and-peck typer.

Cletus and Zeke were fired.

The next morning the first shift foreman's account was frozen after he incorrectly typed his password, "numberone" three times. IT reset his password to "Password1". And he failed three times. He called up IT and used abusive language. They reset it again to "password" and the foreman got bounced again.

The foreman threatened the IT helpdesk with physical harm as well as using abusive language. Never a good idea when talking to IT.

On a whim, IT pulled his browsing log. He was fired before lunchtime.

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