Stevens and Tom

I hope no one gets the idea from yesterday's post that I habitually fight with my employers. My near brawl with Stevens is the only time in my entire working career that I was openly disrespectful toward my supervisor. At least that I recall. After my run in with Stevens, my original supervisor Bud was medically retired and Stevens' henchman Tom was promoted to replace Bud. I was put under Tom's supervision. Tom was less onerous to work for, mostly because he was not as skilled as Stevens at being an a-hole. Plus he wasn't that bright. Tom's chief qualification for promotion was that he was a shameless boot-licker. One day I called into dispatch at 11:45am to report out for my one hour lunch. When I arrived at my first service call after lunch at 12:45pm I found Tom already there. He handed me a piece of paper and a pen and asked me to read and sign the paper. It was a disciplinary note that I had taken ninety minutes for lunch. I told him to call dispatch to confirm that I left for lunch at 11:45. He said that he knew when I left, but that it was now 1:15, ninety minutes LATER. I looked at my watch, which said 12:50 and showed it to him. In turn, he showed me his watch, which was 30 minutes fast. We actually had to go into the homeowners house to look at a clock before he got that his watch was running fast. He was forever doing this kind of thing. The older guys in our yard loved to mess with these two. Stevens would look for ways to bust people. Thirty-five years ago, many supervisors thought that their objective was to catch an employee doing something wrong, so he prowled the yard looking for trouble. After a long day of service calls, our trucks would be full of empty boxes and broken or unused parts. Our job was to throw away the garbage and separate the recyclable broken parts for refurbishment. Stevens would go through the garbage bin looking for recyclable parts that had been tossed out rather than held for recycle. When he found something all hell would break loose. He would pile the offending material on the conference room table and we would all be forced to look at it while he threatened us with our jobs. One afternoon Stevens actually crawled into the dumpster, looking for his treasure and one of the older guys locked him inside. He was in there for a while before someone heard him pounding on the side and let him out. He came out vowing to fire the person responsible, but that cured him of getting into the dumpster. Fortunately, I was moved to a job in dispatch working for a wonderful guy named Dale and was free of these two buffoons forever. It was the longest year of my life. On the health front, I am getting better. My doctor gave me a new medication yesterday that is for neurological pain. In a certain percent of cases of shingles, the pain remains as a permanent condition, after the shingles have disappeared, so this medication blocks the pain signals to the nerves. Among the side effects are weight gain and sleepiness. Just great. So far I've taken two doses and I can hardly keep my eyes open. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky