Double Talk

This morning at our shape-up meeting Starner exhorted us to come to work every day. “I got more problems than any of you,” he said. “But I’m here at work every day.” I turned to Summerfield, who was standing beside me. “I’d like to know what work he does,” I said. “Chasing pussy,” he replied. Summerfield, a redneck with snaggle teeth and long gray hair, is about 6’3” tall and 240 lbs. He’s got a waterfront home on which he’s struggling to make $1700 a month mortgage payments, so he doesn’t need a pep talk about coming to work. He also told me he’s got a gun collection including, I think, 39 hand guns and three AK-47s.

Later in the day Summerfield asked if he could borrow my firewatch. I said yes, because Joe and I didn’t have a welder and couldn’t do any hotwork. He said Starner had assigned him to cut some steel pads off the deck of a fan room with an angle grinder. But the firewatch coordinator had no firewatches to assign him, so Starner told him, “You’re your own firewatch today.” Starner, who always says “Safety first” (the official company line), knows very well that not only isn’t Summerfield qualified to firewatch, but firewatching for oneself is both against company policy and a violation of government rules. Luckily Summerfield wasn’t dumb enough to fall for that one, because if he’d been caught Starner would have denied telling him to do it.