Thursday Soaps

Fast Moving Construction

Yesterday started out to be a quiet day until I met up with my old buddies from the road paving crew.  They’ve moved to the main street I use to get to work (see Green Tunnels post) and this caused a twenty minute detour through even more back roads to get to work.  Since it’s only a thirty minute commute to begin with I thought twenty minutes was a bit harsh.  My boss and I took a ride down to the construction site and got a tour of the rapidly moving project.  I got to wear a safety vest and hard hat so I felt very official (almost as cool as my son).  It reminded me how much I do not miss wearing a helmet (possibly the worst thing about the being in the infantry – but I digress).  One of my subordinates here had been having trouble with some of his employees and the union got involved so I called them all into my office for a meeting.  It really boiled down to a situation roughly analogous to a bad Spanish soap opera.  All people involved in the situation are union members but they don’t like each other and were pursuing petty little vendettas.  The union officers exaggerated everything out of context and only further inflamed a bad situation.  After talking everybody back down to earth I pointed out the supervisors were not meeting the standards we had clearly set out for them and the reason we wanted to replace them with non-union managers in the first place.  The union officers felt betrayed because they had fought hard to retain the positions and now the people holding the positions were stabbing them in the back (like I said – soap opera).  I agreed to call all of the offending employees into my office next week to read them the riot act (again) and lecture them on leadership, so I’ll have to come up with something on that.  I did tell the union officers that the meeting would be documented as evidence the union members were not fulfilling the standards we had all agreed to.  An indication of how far we have come is that the union officials agreed with me.  It seems that for the first time in the four years I’ve worked here that management and the union are actually working together to solve problems – kind of the way things are supposed to be.  The day was rescued when I returned home and my wife and I had had long phone conversations with both the son and daughter.  The daughter was recovering from some sort of stomach flu but luckily had the redoubtable son in law around (at last) to assist in her recovery.  Our son was able to spare a few minutes from his busy life while walking to get some pizza with the M.E.G. after a futile volleyball game.  For those of you worrying about the fate of Buddy after his failed attempt to open a new passageway in my wife favorite (and expensive) living room couch – he’s wormed his way into our hearts much too deeply to risk Gator-Thor treatment (story for another day).  Buddy even received a special invite from my sister to the Saturday party in Rhode Island we are headed to – life of a rock star indeed.

Inside the Construction Zone

Looking 16 Kinds of Official