Who's Your Boss?

I was sitting on a 5 gallon bucket yesterday, cleaning out a brush, enjoying the silence. The birds were singing, a Harley rumbled by and the kids two doors down in back were happily playing yet, the silence was deafening. It's what I wasn't hearing that was so enjoyable.

If a Ferrerman sets down to clean a brush and no one is around to say: "WHY ARE YOU SITTING DOWN?", is the Ferrerman not damn lucky?

In the South at least, for a painter to sit down at anytime other than break or lunch is a crime right up there with Yankee armies invading southern soverenignty or harboring a runaway slave. Why, it's just wrong. It causes much gnashing of teeth by bosses and co-workers alike. From a co-workers perspective, the guy sitting down is just about the laziest, non-painting m-ferer one has ever seen. One must go to the boss and report this setting sighting at once. The boss, whether he see's or hears of the sitting, will have smoke coming out of his ears like no cartoon characters business. There are two things that paint superintendents hate. One is the bucket sitting, the other is painters not rolling down far enough to cover the base. Surprisingly, these two hates are also the two qualifications necessary to run a paint crew. If you can cuss people out for sitting down while working and if you can constantly remind a rollerman to "roll down far enough to cover the base", you are qualified to run a paint crew. That IS all you need to know. It helps if you suck as a painter yourself and you're golden if you are the bosses kin and otherwise unemployable. Sometimes, nothing succeeds like success at nothing.

Lucifer T Dork (not his real name) was the idiot brother of one of the owners of Ratmo Construction (not it's real name). When I met him he was 44 years old and claiming 33 years of painting experience. The math on that tells me that he turned pro at the age of 11. Wow, you need to listen to a guy with that much experience.

No, you don't. Lou had made up his experience. Yes, he had painted when he was 11 years old. Daddy had been a house painter and used both his sons as cheap labor while he drank whiskey and cussed the boys out while he sat under a shade tree, drowning his demons and creating some for his children. Lou went on to tell me that he had had his own business- he painted bridges- but that he had lost the business during a divorce. Nope. Prior to his brother promoting him to paint cew superintendent, the closest he had come to being a working painter was to stand next to a working painter and explain to him why the wall the painter needed to paint was not ready to paint. At Ratmo, Lou had trained as a sheetrock finisher for two years. He wasn't very good at that either, from what I would later hear.

Every boss has to act like he knows everything you don't and that that is why he is your boss. Lou would say things to us like: "Did you know that you could thin latex paint with alcohol?" I pondered that. I guess that you could but, why would you do this? Technically you could thin it with your own piss but, why? Lou regaled us with similar pearls of his wisdom for the six years I worked at Ratmo. Once he told me and Steve G, that he had taken ten I.Q. tests in that past year and his score was 162. I'll never forget stifling my own laughter while watching Steve, hunched over, hands over his mouth, walking away from the conversation stifling his own laughter while I held my tongue. Lord I wanted so badly to tell him that he wasn't supposed to ADD up all his scores. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Lou was our "good boss". Had this been Little Jimmy, I would have been all over it. Lou was comical to the crew and so was Little Jimmy but, whereas Jimmy was evil and vengefull, Lou wasn't. He was the fool you gladly suffered because he could over-rule, Jimmy, the insufferable little prick. Sometimes you gotta pick your poison.

I don't recall Lou ever grieving me for sitting down while I worked. If he had, I had probably gently set him straight. I'm just a couple of years younger than him so, I've got my aches and pains from working for a living just like he could claim. Working on my knees is a trial. Knee pads help but, as I grew older the less I abused my knees, the better. If I had to work low and be in one place for 5- 10 minutes, I'd pull up a bucket and work off of it. Being 6 foot two, the bucket also served as a table for my cut pot while running a door frame and (if the safety man wasn't around) it was also a five gallon ladder to quickly get to those hard to reach places.

No boss could ever grasp this. The bucket, for me, was a tool to help me perform my job. It wasn't a lounge chair. Most bosses will tell you that it's not their purpose to tell you HOW to do something, it's just their job to make sure you do it. That's all. Unless you're sitting on a bucket. Then you should be beaten with a four to eight rolling pole.

I don't have a lot of work right now but I do have a boss who isn't an idiot. And, I've got a five gallon bucket.