So, for my deficient survival skills. The reason I’m working on the ship I’m on now is that I got kicked off the last ship I was on.
The supervisor there, Dean, used to be a friend of mine, long ago, before he became a supervisor. Until the incident I’m about to describe, I still considered him a friend, although in the years he’s been a supervisor he’s become so “ate up” with the job that he’s not interested in anything else. This particular job was one that we were working at another shipyard nearby. The company I work for wasn’t the prime contractor on that one, but a sub. Anyhow, this ship was a rather old Navy amphibious ship.
Dean, after bouncing me around on several different jobs, all of them partly or completely screwed up by people who had worked on them before I got there, assigned me a work item that involved setting foundations in the overhead for new cooling units. These units are large - - roughly 5 feet long by 3.5 feet wide by 16 inches high and weigh several hundred pounds. There were four of them, all to be located in very cramped control rooms, the largest of which was about 10 feet by 15 feet. All these spaces were filled with various types of equipment and had several trades and different contractors working in them at the same time.
The units were to be bolted to the foundations which were made of steel angle welded to the deck above. For some reason our fabrication shop had made them all 2 inches too wide and in such a way that it was impossible to drill all the mounting holes in the right places. Okay, my helper and I solved that problem by drilling new holes in the mounting flanges of the units themselves and then transferring this new hole pattern to the foundation. Annoying, but no big deal. Then, it happened that in one of the control rooms the Navy’s plans called for mounting the unit in a location so close to an adjacent bulkhead that when it was raised into place it was almost impossible to get the bolts in. But my helper on this one, “Sancho Panza,” and I managed to do it somehow. I have long arms, but because of all the equipment, piping, electrical cables, etc. in the way, I had to stretch up at a very awkward angle while standing precariously on a ladder that wasn’t under me because of equipment in the way. Plus I had to get both arms up behind the unit, one to reach up over to hold the nut, while I turned the socket wrench with a long extension the other. The unit, meanwhile, teetered on a table jack that the riggers couldn’t center under the unit properly, again because of the equipment in the way, equipment that couldn’t be moved. All in all, not a safe situation. Nevertheless, we made it happen, as they say. But when I got down from the ladder I couldn’t straighten up for quite a while. I had pulled a muscle in my back. It was the end of the shift and I wasn’t going to go back to our yard to report to first aid, knowing there was nothing they could do beside waste my time sending me somewhere for x-rays and ultimately giving me some pain killers. Anyhow, I wasn’t in a lot of pain and my back was better the next day. Okay, I know, I’m sounding like a whiner. But I have to give this background.
A couple of weeks went by. Then some inspector discovered that whoever had put up that foundation had failed to cut off some pieces of an old foundation they were supposed to rip out. It didn’t make any difference, because the cooling unit covered it up, but the prime contractor insisted the unit had to come down again and the old foundation removed. Dean, who had never checked behind the guys that screwed up here -- he wasn’t checking behind anybody -- ordered me to do it. (Dean, in fact, almost never came on the ship at all. He just went to meetings and did paperwork in the office trailer.) By this time I had lost what remaining respect I’d had for this ex-friend. Actually, he didn’t order me directly, he did it through Myron, his go-fer. Myron had just made supervisor a month after graduating from apprentice school. Now, apparently, he was an apprentice supervisor, because he didn’t do any supervising. He didn’t do anything except run errands for Dean.
Anyhow, it was Myron, delivering the message from Dean, who told me to take the cooling unit down again. After all the grief getting it up, I was pissed. I told him the back of the unit was impossible to get at, that I’d messed up my back putting it in place, and that I wasn’t going to risk messing it up again. This, after all, was a company that constantly harangues us about safety and made us all sign a pledge not to do anything unsafe. Myron didn’t know what to say. He hemmed and hawed, then said he’d talk to the superintendent in charge and see if there was some other way of solving the problem. That was in the morning. Then, as I was on my way to lunch, Myron stopped me and told me that the riggers would be in the control room right after lunch to take the unit down. “Okay,” I said. That was all. I knew what he meant, because in our company we, the shipfitters, are the ones who have to unbolt stuff. Then the riggers remove it. But he didn’t tell me to be there, and I’m not getting paid to read minds. After lunch I didn’t go to that space, except to pass through and get something I’d left there (the riggers hadn’t arrived yet). Instead I went to another location that Myron had told me to take care of. About 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon I came off the ship and there was Myron. He asked me where I’d been and claimed they’d been looking for me all afternoon. Then he lied and said he’d told me to be in the control room to unbolt the cooling unit for the riggers. He ordered me to pack up my tools and go back to our yard and report to the foreman. I said I was going to talk to Dean, which made him furious. Dean wasn’t around, however. When I finally got hold of him on his cell phone he said he was in a meeting but when he was done he would meet me in the control room to look at the situation of the cooling unit. But he never showed up. By then it was the end of the shift. Next morning at the start of the shift I did report to the foreman. I explained about the cooling unit, but he claimed to know nothing about this whole business. He phoned Dean, who denied that sending me back to the yard had anything to do with anything except that he was cutting back on manpower and didn’t need me any longer. That was total bullshit. Kicking me off the job was about Myron’s ego and power and Dean just decided to bail on the whole issue. Later, I learned from one of the other supervisors that the buzz in the supervisors’ office at the yard was that I had trouble taking orders from young black men. It had to be “young” because at least half the supervisors are black and I’ve never been accused of having trouble taking orders from any of the others. More on this later.
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