Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [80]
“But it’s even more than that,” another guy offered. “With Sherman, if a customer accused us of damaging something, and we said we ain’t do it, by God, we ain’t do it! He would back us one hundred percent to the point that he would start threatening the customer. ‘Dammit! My boys ain’t do that! I’ll see your ass in court.’ It ain’t like that with Jed. He just cares about making that paper.”
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying we needed more money, or we were itching for a health care plan (although both of those would have been fantastic). In fact, not many people that I met during my tenure at Fast Company complained about what they were getting paid. They were just mad at the lack of hands-on leadership. They didn’t feel like they belonged to anything. They felt abused. They were robots, sent out to make money for the big boss man, go home, and return and repeat the next day. It was a vicious, destructive cycle, and it hurt the overall morale.
In later conversations, I discovered that even Jill, Jed’s mom, felt wholeheartedly that Jed wasn’t around enough to run a successful business. “Eight-to-ten,” she told me. “He needs to be here in the morning to see the boys off, and then he can go do estimates or damage assessments or play golf or whatever.” The proof could be found by comparing the Fast Company in Charleston with the one in Myrtle Beach, which was owned by Jed’s brother, Frankie. Frankie wasn’t paying his employees near what Jed was paying us. But, Frankie was there, having man-to-man contact with his workers. He would take them out to lunch or hang out with them outside of work. He knew the right buttons to push to keep his employees pumped up, motivated to want to work hard. The morale was at a whole different level than ours.
On the other hand, I can tell you the exact moment when I knew that I had become an official member of the Fast Company crew, the moment that I came to have a sense of acceptance.
The pecking order around the shop was separated by one’s reputation as a mover. If you were a good mover, then you were a good guy. If you were a bad mover, then you still might have been a good guy, but you were sentenced to the bottom of the hierarchy where you were showered with idle small talk or ignored altogether. (Bad movers, by the way, were either rare at Fast Company, or they were assigned to moves where they had to work with each other. The scheduling system was such that the worst movers were weeded out via their own discovery that they simply didn’t belong at Fast Company.) For several months that was me, but I had stuck with it, thus earning a bit of respect. And one day I came into the shop, and everybody had a good laugh at my expense.
The topic of conversation surrounded my work attire. Guys at the shelter had already given me plenty of flak about my man-purse, the only tote bag available at the time at the Goodwill, and now it was Fast Company’s turn to get on my clothes. From the waist up, I looked normal, donning the standard work shirt that everyone was required to wear on the job. But then there were my shorts, which had, well, earned their name. I had bought about five pairs from the Goodwill to wear on the job, and I got what I paid for: not a single pair of them extended below mid-thigh. And there we were, in the shop, and anybody and everybody was taking shots at me and my sense of style.
“Shep, Daisy Duke called. She wants her shorts back.”
Laughter.