Atlas Shrugged. Or: Buy your own fucking tools!

OK kids, clear your mind. You're about to be subjected to a free-flowing rant about things that piss me right the hell off and a discussion of the philosophy that is the reason I instigated an angry confrontation at work today. My nephew is the person that made it turn into an angry confrontation, while my brother seemed highly amused and the other four or five people on the crew were either confused, scared, intimidated, or a combination of the above.

I had no intention of causing an angry confrontation. I was just going to state a fact. I was relatively cool until Skeeter (my nephew) opened his mouth, as I knew he would, and I was Not About To Take Any Of His Shit. So I didn't. And responded angrily to his anger. He smarts off much more, and I'll cut his ass off from my Christmas card list. Not that I am into sending them out anyway. Skeeter is a Redneck's Redneck, and he don't cotton to being told what to do or how to do it, and especially if he thinks someone is showing him up on a jobsite. Stupid macho bullshit. I can play that game if I have to. Don't like it, but I will play to win if forced into it.

But here is the deal:

I am a lazy slob. I'm so laid back that a recliner is too steep for me. I don't sweat stuff. Life is too short to waste your time on petty bullshit. Now listen to me: This does not mean that I don't care. It just means that I choose my battles carefully. You might read this blog and think that I just go around ranting all of the time. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I am the most laid-back dude in the world. Until you piss me off. I do not, after being a very angry young man whose anger caused himself numerous serious problems, get pissed off easily. I try and control that shit. See, most of the fuckups in my life came from a reaction to my anger about whatever.

The "whatever" that I have never been able to get past is the feeling that someone is taking advantage of my good nature. They are fucking me over because I am a nice guy. It's happened too many times. I am at a point where I overlook the incidents less and less because I know that if I allow it to continue I will blow up. The last time I was this pissed, about 9 years ago, I broke a bone in my hand, taking my anger out on a wall. The holes are still there. The hand seems to have healed. The emotional scars never will. That is just a fact.

Here is the philisophical part....

Socialism is evil. It just is. Its core principles are contrary to basic human nature. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" may sound good in theory, but it never works when you are dealing with real human beings. Some people are just better than others. At whatever. You cannot, and you must not, ask the high achiever to subsidize the low achiever. The low achiever gets ever lazier (see New Orleans, "send us your money, you owe it to us for nothing!") while the high achiever keeps on working and achieving. Eventually, the high achiever gets tired of carrying all of the low achievers on his back. Thus, Atlas Shrugs. I am fucking tired of carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Y'all can kiss my ass. I will carry you no more.

I have spent a small fortune on tools. I am anal about my tools. I Hate to loan them out to people that have no concept of property, or the concept of what money represents. I have been loaning out my tools. I have been allowing people to make a living with the tools that I and my wife spent hard earned money on. Until today. It's OVER.

Thus, buy your own fucking tools. You get a paycheck every week just like me. So fuck you, go and buy your own fucking tools. You don't respect me, you don't respect my tools, kiss my skinny white ass. I am done with supplying you with the tools you need to make a living. Go sponge off of someone else.

The funny thing about this whole deal is, I am the only one, with the possible exception of my brother, that knows what just happened.

Heavy lies the head...

...That wears the crown. Truer words were never spoken or written. You think you want to be the boss? Be in charge, run things? Hah! Get some of it and check back with me. You can have it.

I have posted a bit of my work history. I was self-employed for a long time. I was The Man. In Tech Hell, I was often The Man because I was left alone and in charge for long evenings. I have been in charge. For me, at least, it sucks.

I'm an artist, a craftsman. I want to be given a task to accomplish and be left alone to get it done. As a perfectionist, I enjoy producing superior work. Makes me happy. Anything that interferes with me doing my work is a pain in the ass.

In short, I have no desire or need to be The Man. I am perfectly content to be A Man. Just a guy.

I have one big problem, though. I am a born leader. Though quite content to follow, I somehow end up at the front, dammit. I guess it's something people see in me, that I need no supervision, I can make decisions and deal with whatever may come, they seem to fall in behind me. I think they just want to have someone besides themselves get "shot at" first. Fucking cowards.

Yes, I am whining. But only because I have a rant to go with it. I had to set it up, you see.

I got put in charge of a remodel job for my company, which in case my boss stumbles across this, is the best fucking construction company in the world.

Now that the boss is mollified and has navigated away from this page, I can say without coming across as an ass kisser: It really is the best. For a lot of reasons. I could list them and go into detail, but I'll just say that I talk to people from the other trades about work conditions, benefits, and such, and I get a lot of head shaking and a lot of "Wows". Employees of our company have no idea how good they have it. I do. I've worked for a lot of contractors and none of them were even close to the standards this company has. So even though I would rather be Just A Guy, I can't complain too much about being put in charge. Just rant.

Here we go: I'm a carpenter. People often make me angry. Thus, The Mad Carpenter.

You know who really makes me angry? Oh, dickheads that don't drive for shit, inconsiderate assholes in line in public places, people that can't control their kids, the usual. Those people can't hold a candle to my number one list of People That Piss Me Right The Hell Off: Tradespeople that do substandard work and shrug it off or make excuses.

Especially on a job that I am in charge of. Your fucked up shit makes ME , and by extension my company, look bad in front of the homeowner. You think I like standing there with my dick in my hand, looking like a fool because you suckie suckie?

There have been a lot of fuckups on my first "in charge" job. Some of them have been because of my inexperience at running a job, but most of them have been because of workers that just plain don't give a fuck. That pisses me off more than you can imagine. Hey shithead, if you don't care enough to do this shit right, get your fucking ass a paper route, goddammit! There are a ton of help wanted ads in the paper! Go get another job and quit ruining my life!

I have been very nice to everyone, very calm, because I am feeling my way here on my first"in charge" job. That, and I don't want to be a jerk. I love my job, I don't want to embarrass my employer. Today, though, I had to pinch the bridge of my nose and hold myself back. This one fucking dude was already on my shit list. Then, THEN, he fucked up the simplest task imaginable only twenty minutes after having it explained. His explanation, in broken Engrish, was "Oh, I forgot. Ha ha...".

FUCK!

I wanted to strangle him, field dress him, chop him up, and feed him to the neighborhood dogs. It would have been almost poetic in its ironic justice.

My wife tells me that I need to just go off on these people. Let them understand that they do in fact not know what I am capable of. I think she may have a point. I will ask my boss about that.

I may never be in charge of another job again, but if I am, I will damned sure make some motherfuckers snap to when I am around. No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more Mr. Clean. No more Mr. Nice Guy, they'll say "He's sick, he's obscene". Guess I will have to practice being a jerk, because that is all some people seem to respond to. Sad commentary, and a bummer for me.

My dog bit me on the leg today,
My cat clawed my eye
Mom's been thrown out of the social circles
And Daddy has to hide
I got no friends 'cause they read the papers
They can't be seen with me
And I'm feelin' real shot down
And I'm gettin' mean

-Alice Cooper

No more. Mr. Nice guy.

The Kinder, Gentler Email Nazi

I've done a lot of things in my life. I can't say I would do anything differently, given the mystical chance at a do-over, even though I have fucked up plenty. I certainly wouldn't say that I am proud of everything I have done (and honestly, who would?) but the things I have done were a result of who I was, acting on the information I had at the time. It was all honest, right or not. I would not recommend my life experiences for everyone, nor wish a lot of them on anyone. The bottom line is that all of my experiences have made me who I am, and I'm a Pretty Good Guy. And as Radney Foster says, half of the good things in my life came from half of my mistakes.

One thing I did was a three year stint at technical support. If you are thinking that my wording evokes images of a prison sentence, you would be correct. I've never been to prison, but I've been to jail a few times. The difference is, in jail you know you fucked up and you have no one to blame but yourself. Come to think of it, that kind of reminds me of how technical support duty went for me... so forget any difference. I think prison may pay better, though.

While in Tech hell, I developed a severe intolerance to stupid emails. Stupid people, hell, I had that intolerance already. Especially since I had just closed a ten year old retail business. The general public can and often does suck out loud. Now here I was, sitting at a desk answering often stupid questions from the aforementioned general public. And I could not fire them. I had fired plenty of customers before when I was the boss, even ran a couple off in anger. Now, almost suddenly, I had to play nice. No matter how rude or unreasonable or stupid they might be.

It went against every fiber of my being. It went against everything I believe. Coddling stupidity and ineptness is the same as encouraging stupidity and ineptness. Same with rudeness. You think I wanted to put up with that shit? I have a saying: "The customer is always the customer. They are not always right." To allow and thus to de facto encourage bad behavior from the general public is the bane of a polite society. People start expecting that if they are enough of an asshole, they will get the outcome they want. I have always been a stalwart against that trend.

But, for three long, depressing years, I did my best to hold back. Oh, most of the people were nice and we had a great relationship. I did a lot of teaching in those days and the customers were grateful. They no longer needed the help line the next time because I made them more knowledgeable. But that 20% or so of the complete idiots and some of the people that I swear were mentally incompetent, not to mention the complete dickheads... well, let's just say that the day I was laid off from that job was a relief.

I once spent a full ten minutes (I watched the clock a lot back then) trying to get a woman to right click on her mouse. It was then that I fully experienced the Theory of Relativity as it pertains to time. That was the longest ten minutes of my life. I swear, it took longer than it did to have an abcessed molar pulled and the infection scraped off my jawbone. Come to think of it, the ten years I spent self-employed flew by compared to the three years in tech support hell.

So Gloom, Despair, and Agony on me. Deep Dark Depression, Excessive Misery. That was those three years. I spent twelve or fourteen hours per day on the web or email, and as I stated, I have a very low tolerance for stupidity. I became the Email Nazi.

You know how annoying it is to get that FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW:FW: thing, usually a hoax or urban legend, with twenty recipients in the address line? The one you have seen twice already? Try being in my situation at the time, where you get every fucking hoax email in the world forwarded to you twenty times a day. You and all of those people you don't know. Now you have their addresses, they have yours, and you have no idea where the hell your address has been forwarded yet again by the mindless general public. Pissed me off. I. Don't. Need. This. Shit.

So, since I had to play nice and grit my teeth back then, I tended to take it out on people in my personal life that acted so stupidly. I ripped them new assholes. The downside is that those people are scared shitless to email me anything. Come to think of it, that is the upside as well. I don't get that personal spam anymore.

Still, I have mellowed. I don't drop the hammer like I used to. Case in point, I got an email from a person named Elizabeth Vakili [evakili@chot.org] today, with the subject line being "Can U".

Talk about waving a red flag in front of a bull. Send me something by accident. O.K. Don't know how to BCC your list? Big problem. Use teenager text message language in the subject line? Christ. But I'm a nice guy. Here was her request:

"Get Stephanie Colston RN a password etc. for the computer so she can enter her timesheets. Also she is doing a lot of admits & she needs to be able to enter meds & do the PPOC. -thanx"

Uhhh, Liz, I am a carpenter. I have no clue as to who the hell you are, although I may have the opportunity to run you over with my pickup truck as you atttempt to cross the street. I hope you are better at your job than you are at using a vital tool of your job, the computer.

No, I didn't send that to her. I thought about it, though. Here is what I actually sent back:

"Sorry, I have no idea who you are and no ability to grant or deny access to the "computer" you reference. Could you please remove my email address from your list? Thanks in advance. David Burrow"

As I said in the title, kinder and gentler. I wonder if nurses that are not smart enough to use a computer properly are cognizant of the extreme sarcasm contained in my reply?

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Coming soon, I will highlight the results of work done by Illegal Aliens. You know, they are doing "jobs Americans won't do". I'll say they are. The Americans I work with would be ashamed to do work that shitty...

Here we go again...

I'll go ahead and get this thing going. I will have some things to say in days to come. I may even post the things I have to say here if I can get past the feeling of the beat-down that the internet has become for me.

Don't touch that dial.