Graphic Firing Table

I've been working all week (You: but...but you're retired, right? WTF? Me: Ummm. Hang on, I'll get there...) and I've been getting up at 4am to get there, so I'm gonna do the old retired guy thing and take a fucking nap.

But first, I wanted to drop in here and throw out some passing thoughts.

So...retired.

Yeah, well. I didn't want to just drop into the rocking chair and find myself dead of some sort of aneurysm six months from now like every other retired dude. I asked around among some friends still in the biz to give me a call if they needed a hand with anything. One did, so I'm dirt-nannying a job up outside the tiny no-longer-a-real-town of Goble up in Columbia County.

It's irritating, like all this dirt-nanny work, but, hey...it helps pay the bills, and it's only for a month or two.

But that wasn't what reminded me of "working". 

It was an e-mail from my last chief engineer, from where I just retired out of.

He said he wanted to talk; specifically about my last annual "bonus" from the outfit we work(ed) for.

I assume if you've worked for any sort of big business you know what I'm talking about. At the end of the calendar year corporate masters hand out an envelope with some extra jack in it.

Or not; if business has been bad there may be nothing. My first workplace, David Newton Associates, tended to have fat years and lean years and the year-end kick tended to vary depending on how fat or how lean. 

One of the lean years our "bonus" was a fucking frozen turkey.

But this last outfit has a peculiar addition to that tradition; your immediate boss is supposed to "tell you about" your bonus - hence the e-mail from the former CE needing to have a FTF with me about this bonus.

What it reminded me was how I hated that little talk with the heat of a million suns.

What it always did was remind me how much my corporate masters seemed to think what a huge fucking favor they were doing me by handing me this cash bolus which my work earned for them in the first place.

It was a sort of 21st Century largesse, the coins tossed into the crowd of grubby proles by the noble on horseback, and the little talk that came with it irked me more every year I heard it.

Didn't matter if the speaker was someone I liked or, as this guy, was someone I wasn't particularly fond of.

It got to the point where I had to bite my tongue to respond with something biting. One thing I did early on was stop thanking the person. 

Why? Why thank them? How in any way was this a gift? I worked, and worked well, for it. I earned it, it wasn't largesse, it was a measure of my value.

But the corporate requirement to present it as a gift, to "talk" about it as such, made the company's rep come off like they were handing it down as a favor that they should be thanked for, and this time - he finally caught me on the phone - was no different.

I didn't thank him; I agreed it was a nice kick, we talked a bit about work, and he buggered off. 

That was my last one of those little talks - I'm no longer a salaried employee, and I'm no longer eligible for the thing.

Good. We may be in the Second Gilded Age. But I don't need an annual reminder that the coal barons still want to shove us back into company towns, thanks.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the continued Twitter tsuris.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle has a long post about his thoughts - which, as usual, are fairly well-reasoned and to the point - about this flaming trainwreck, but my own perspective on the issue is a peculiar one.

I read a lot of politics and a lot of political blogs, so I hear a lot about the nonsense. And I can see how it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that a high-function autistic, obscenely rich white boy marinated in the toxic shitbrew of apartheid South Africa could, indeed, be an unhinged shitposting MAGA nutball who is turning a social media platform into a fairly accurate resemblance to his own freakish internal headspace.

But the thing is...I don't get my news off the platform. 

I don't use it to communicate with others. 

I pretty much just read; read the content generated by people who write about soccer, or art, or history. I do read some lefty political accounts, like Roy Edroso, but I don't engage with anyone there other than that.

Some, or all, of the people I follow may be taking incoming MAGAt fire...but I'm not in the beaten zone, so I have no idea what the hell that looks like or is.

So...what's kind of weird is that while I know about this shit, I don't really...know it. 

It's like I'm sitting quietly while a knockdown brawl is going on in the next apartment. I hear the thumping and screaming through the walls, raise a brow, cock my head, mutter "Hmmm...", and carry on.

So while Twitter may be just another part of this country overrun with wannabee Blackshirts, looney anti-vaxx 14th Century cosplayers, and Donald Fucking Trump...I'm luckily enough to be in another part of the country.

And I'm fine with that.

Okay. Got to go finish up the paperwork from today's nannying.

But I'll be back in a bit. I've got some more stuff on my mind.

See ya then.

The moment I stepped onto the front porch I knew it would be a breathlessly hot day.


Friday had been very warm in the oppressively cheerful way the early summer days here are warm; in the sun the heat bears down like hot metal while the shady sunless patches are pleasantly cool. The real measure of a hot Oregon day, however, in just at sunrise. Today the sun rose on a flat, breathless sort of dawn. Pulling the air into your chest it felt dry with the scent of dust. Even the asphalt was still slightly warm underfoot.

It would be a hot day.

The Pearl District of Portland has, in the preceding decade, descended from being a rundown post-industrial hardscape of dreary warehouses and melancholy-looking duplex apartments to a shiny, happy bustle of steel and glass and carefully-hand-rubbed artisanry; cute little coffeehouses, precious retail outlets, many, many spas and salons.

The early-morning passersby were already in their hot-weather wear; shorts, brief tops, and sandals, for both men and women.
Why is it that a woman's feet in sandals look pretty and tended while men's just look...unkempt?

The same goes for our legs, unfortunately; most of the Pearl morning women were tender, neat, and attractive from the hips down...while we betesticled types ambled about in an ungainly shackle of knobby knees and hairy shins.

In my heavy boots and thick work pants I envied the gentlemen of leisure their cool shorts and open shoes, but not their bumptious look. I know my own appearance too well to pretend that I would look any less ridiculous in their abbreviation.

There was a single five-hour parking spot next to our work site, a city block being transformed into a wooden-slatted hole in the ground, now full of machinery and the debris of construction. I fiddled with the parking machine and then stopped to enjoy a lovely pedestrian, cool in her flowing white dress and (of course) tidy jeweled feet in tenuous sandals, her bell of iron-gray hair shining like a gunturret in the heavy sun.

She passed with a look, calm and pleased with herself and her morning, bound on who-knows-what errand or no business at all; perhaps merely "taking the air" on a Saturday morning.

I was what I call the "anchor nanny" today. It is, rather like highway driving, one of those appallingly awful tasks that combines the necessity of constant attention with a complete lack of intellectual or physical stimulation. It is bookkeeping, pure and simple; so many feet drilled, so much silt, so much sand, so much anchor length (how much bonded, how much unbonded..?), so much grout pumped.

Primary grout volume, secondary grout volume...the point of the exercise is simply to reduce the number of indeterminate variables when an anchor is tested and fails. That way the designer can decide whether it is the design that is inadequate, or whether the construction was defective, or whether - if both appear satisfactory - the failure was due to some sort of anomalous soil condition that no one could have anticipated.
The crew worked in the heat, roaring like their equipment, cursing and sweating. I moved, like one of those slow-migrating animals (a tortoise, perhaps, or a similar creeping reptilian thing), from west to east following the shadow of the superjacent building and the eastern wall until, finally I could retreat no further and the sun in its' loathsome splendor leapt overhead and I was sweating and cursing and stinking like the rest.

By midafternoon no one wanted to continue. One of the drills got stuck, the foreman breathed out one last fiery curse and shut the job down.

I still had an hour to go, completing my report for the day, but at least in the cool of the old mill building where my company has moved. There was also cold beer, and I could strip out of the heavy protective gear and into shorts, daring the empty office to laugh at my legs. It was late afternoon when I emerged to be punched; gasping, breathless, by the hot, heavy gold blanket of the dying day.


“Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit."

~ Ada Louise Huxtable

Because it was a long, cold day and I'm feeling like looking for trouble.
What the fuck is with contractors who seem to have a problem understanding this simple rule; if you bid the contract to build my engineer's design, you don't get to choose not to build that design because it's haaaaard.

If you can't do the work, don't bid the job.

There's only three things for sure: taxes, death and the trouble I will give your incompetent ass if you send your people out to do a sad, sorry job and then expect me to fucking sign off on it.

I come up hard but never cool.

I'm your construction inspector, and right now I'm your goddamn Trouble Man.