Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [12]
He handed us off to one of his workers who showed us what we would be doing for the day: cleaning up the work area. The site was cluttered with discarded concrete forms from the foundation that had just been poured, and our job for the day was going to be to stack them to the side according to their size: short and skinny, long and skinny, short and wide. At first glance, it looked like enough work to last maybe two hours, contingent upon Cicely’s work ethic, but I didn’t have the nerve to stretch it into a full day’s work as it appeared some of the other guys were doing with their tasks. I watched one guy who was sitting on the rear stoop of the big house puffing on a cigarette, evidently quite delighted with his ability to get away with his masterminded one-two style: work one minute, rest two.
By 9:30, it didn’t matter, however, since Big Bob showed his face sparingly to supervise. It was a typical southern summer day with the temperature in the nineties and the humidity making it seem even hotter. He had retreated to his F-150 pickup truck to hang out in the air conditioning, which made it easy for everyone to work at his or her own pace. And that wasn’t at all a bad situation, since Big Bob was a very poor manager anyway. He would come out, bark orders, and then go back to the air-conditioned comforts of his truck. Nobody respected him. They would obey his instructions while he was around, but once he turned his back, they were right back to doing it their own way. Ironically enough, Big Bob had (by his own admission) earned the right to be lazy after years of his own hard work.
We finished stacking the concrete forms by 10:00 A.M., at which point they had found plenty more work for us to do. We cleaned up miscellaneous trash, removed nails from boards, and filled empty holes with dirt. We broke for lunch at the neighborhood Piggly Wiggly, a southern grocery store chain, at 12:30, and Cicely and I split a lukewarm chicken dinner with green beans. I was already beat. The work was tedious, to be sure, but the heat was really starting to get to me. Cicely was in Superwoman mode, never stopping for a single break, and I surely wasn’t going to be the one to interrupt that trend. The last thing I needed was Santa hollering at me. I fought fatigue, and by 3:00 P.M. we were done.
Big Bob gave us a full seven hours even though we had worked from 8:30 to 3:00 with a half-hour break for lunch in between. “Y’all can come back and work for me anytime you’d like.” A full-time job, which he probably wasn’t offering, sounded appealing at first, but the one arena I had hoped to avoid on a permanent basis under the downpour of humidity in the South was construction. We thanked him and left.
On the way back to EasyLabor to collect the day’s allowance, I asked Cicely why she chose to work so hard. After all, the biggest reason that we finished each task early was because of her remarkable efficiency. She had outworked me on pretty much every project, which didn’t bruise my ego too much since she had been working throughout the summer with EasyLabor, and she was used to the hot days working outside.
“The harder I work, the more praise I receive back at EasyLabor. And if they like you, you get put on better jobs and maybe even a permanent ticket.”
I assumed that first day’s ticket with McMaster’s Construction was an exception to that rule, but I got her point: EasyLabor had a reputation to uphold, and they did that by sending out their best workers to the best (often less back-breaking) jobs.
We arrived back at EasyLabor sooner than many of the other workers. My payment options were to receive a check (succumbing to the billion-dollar