{Saga No.: 9 – The Nine Concentric Circles of Hell, or; the Time I Worked for a Construction Contractor.}
We are one in Hell, as we were above.
Love led us to one death. In the depths of Hell
Caina waits for him who took our lives
This was the piteous tale they stopped to tell.
Enter the grime period of my adult work life. The Prelude – Canto 1, and I at the age of Dante himself.
A year-long lull in reality of professional dinge. I liquify as a larval cocoon and emerge as a ghost moth.
Day One of the First Circle was simply to set in place my chamber of torture and lark of malcontent.
In September 2014, the night before my first day at McDubh Construction Company, I smoked a 60-gauge maduro cigar and I had a neat shot of bourbon to top it off. The next morning, I was told I needed to go take an unexpected urinalysis examination.
I was about as worried as I reasonably should have been. I mean I didn’t do any drugs. I didn’t even smoke weed.
But there is always that nagging paranoia that something could go askew due to lab tech error. The level of power these wretched imps hold over people’s livelihood is astounding.
My report came back “nonconclusive”. I was notified that I could not begin work right away and that they needed to “wait and see”. So, I was to go an undefined number of days without pay while I waited on whatever I was waiting on.
Limbo.
I was shot to a plane of capitalistic fear and panic that leveled the blood red moon. I had already quit my previous job and the idea of the embarrassing notion of having to go back there was a bit much to grapple with, mentally. Especially if I had to go back because I failed a drug test.
Did the lab personnel drop the sample and become too humiliated to admit it? Was the nonconclusive determination due to the high levels of nicotine and probably some traces of alcohol still in my system from my late-night solo party?
Perhaps the mesh of combined stimulant and depressant were masking some sort of psychoactive mind-altering mushroom, or habitual crackpipe exploits? Was this a common ploy?
From my end, the indulgence involved completely legal endeavors, albeit questionable decision-making regarding timing, I suppose.
I learned a lesson that day, my friends. I would never and will never again quit a job unless I’ve already passed a drug test for the next job. Seems like solid logic, yet I don’t know how to trust anything to just anyone. It’s a balance of wording. You can’t specifically ask anything outright, or inquire, because then it just simply looks like you take illegal drugs. Whether you do or not.
…
I picked up my small truck from the Yard in West Chatham. It wasn’t a nice truck. In fact, that tiny pickup was what you would define as a beater. But the tainted conveyance was tax free and a step beyond paying two dollars per hour for a vehicle like I was doing at my last place.
I didn’t mind so much the previous wear on the vehicle because I liked to smoke cigars in there during the workday. That coffee-stained shit box of a rusty truck with an undoubtably Marlboro-filled history was my judgement free zone.
There was promise of a brand-new truck in the future. But it was a future I’d never witness. You see, I only spent ten months in my employment at McDubh – definitely a record for me, albeit jam packed with technical experience as well as valuable notable professional connections. Which I think was the silver lining.
…
I parked at my new project. The Second Concentric Circle of Hell. The initial (and arguably only) IDOT project I had with the title of QC Manager: Lynwood Grade Separation in Lynwood, Illinois.
Inches from the Indiana border, the plan for the grade separation was to build Route 30 up, over some existing railroad tracks, and put in place a three-sided precast structure beneath the road for a bike path.
I walked into the office trailer and met the PM, Paul, an affable young dude, my age – early thirties. He had gone through the proper, relaxed, polite channels of attending college for Construction Managment. I, on the other hand had gone the backwoods route of flunking out of art school and garnering experience through word of mouth, white knuckling every instance as it came flying at me.
I met Larry Staal the McDubh Superintendent. His first words to me were basically, “why are you here?” I don’t think he wanted me to bill time on his project and use up his budget. So that was less than a welcoming introduction and an instant charge of guilt as well as even more panic after barely passing my drug test.
As the initial weeks went by, my assumption that I’d garner some solid management experience began to erode. My business card and email handle said “manager”. But I found my only sense of self-worth and validation on the project to be when I was physically testing concrete. Something I didn’t want to even do for a living.
I might say, in reality, I was a glorified QC technician. A continuation of the previous work I had already been performing for fifteen years. This was not what I had in mind. But if there was no concrete being placed on a single day, it was my nature to begin feeling of no value.
I knew right away that my time there would be limited. I pretty early on, developed this gut feeling, i.e.; goal, that I would put in one solid year with my title of QC Manager, linked to this name from a prestigious local Contractor, and utilize it to move on to the next steppingstone.
The Lynwood job was a joint venture with Araiza, a DBE firm. The owner Trzo would literally pull on to the jobsite in a Lamborghini. I also saw him roll up in a Porsche, a Hummer, a Ferrari and that one car named after a Marvel comic character.
As far as I knew he had many other vehicles as well, and as far as I’m concerned, he could have very well stopped at the Lambo. I get it, dude. The Disadvantaged Business Entity program has served you well.
But Trzo and his son Adriel were kind to me. During my tenure at McDubh, I was always searching for kindness. Like, that’s it. Civility at a bare fucking minimal level. Really sad when I look back.
I came to find that I was always alone there in this universal culture of machismo. Insecure, uneducated sad dads who like to razz. Racist prick after homophobic succubus galore. That was my immediate and intimate experience working in the Infrastructure Group there.
That’s definitely not everyone at McDubh. The corporate side of things seemed very upright and civil. I would not have minded working at the headquarters in South Loop in some capacity. I used to sneak away to Lunch-n-Learn sessions there, simply to be around regular people who didn’t rock cargo pants and neon tee shirts.
In fact, I was told specifically by my boss not to talk to certain people in the corporate building. I learned shortly thereafter, he was cobbling together some sort of militia group of outcasted pirates.
My boss used to take salvageable materials home and decorate his yard with them. He owned a trailer hitch, and he’d bring home the bobcat without permission, just to use it in his own home construction projects. These are the only two things I even knew about. No real clue what else was even going on.
To digress, going from a materials-specific world into a realm of straight up distilled, hardcore construction, allotted a full new language. Carnal malefactors from every department in every aspect of work were talking about things I had never heard of. I had utterly no idea what was slang jargon and what was official terminology. It wouldn’t have mattered if I could tell the difference anyway, because I didn’t know either set of dialect.
If I used the wrong term, out of a sheer intention on using the correct term, I’d get razzed like no other. I do see the humor. It just would have been more funny to me if it hadn’t been directed at me.
I would sit there in a haze of oblivion and acronyms, just hoping someone would talk about concrete or asphalt because that was all I knew. I would secretly pull out my phone to Google phrases that people uttered. My only hope was that whatever I learned from the internet would come up again in some other conversation. I knew full well there was no way to decrypt it, other than the required experience of being around it.
Stitched with re-learning Microsoft Access, figuring out IDOT’s QMP software, and teaching myself how to read Plans and Special Provisions, I watched pile driving in Lynwood. I watched the pile driving just so I could learn it.
During piling, I remember this kid from an engineering firm, asking me the same question Larry asked me: “why are you here?” It wasn’t his fault; he was legitimately just inquiring about what reason I had for being there because he thought I was a QC technician. It didn’t do a lot for my self-esteem, and I often questioned as well… “why am I here?”
I went to lunch with Larry, Paul, and this guy Carlos del Val Cura (who I would later reconvene with ten years later on the Lincoln Yards project where he would be employed by the controversial mega developer Sterling Bay).
I didn’t know Carlos back then. But I have a memory of him walking out of the Circle Interchange shadows like a construction management version of Pablo Escobar. Carlos is tri-lingual and holds a Masters in Engineering for Nuclear Power. As he appeared, a hushed audience of laborers stood in reverence. I shit you not – a McDubh superintendent looked directly at me, nodded toward Carlos and whispered, “that’s a smart man”.
Something I’ll never forget – on the car ride to this Mexican place on Calumet Ave, the entire fucking lunch, and then the car ride back to the field office, I don’t think I understood one solitary sentence Larry and Carlos said. Like I just had no fucking clue what they were talking about for the totality of that ninety-minute jaunt. Paul didn’t say anything either but I’m positive he at least had a leg up on me.
…
In winter, like with every road construction project, came down time. But it would be the first winter in the previous decade, depressingly enough, that I would not be laid off. So that alone was another bright spot for me.
I knew about this coffee place called Grindhouse in Griffith, Indiana because they did a collaborative beer with 18th Street Brewing. I would get myself over to Grindhouse, I’d say basically on a daily basis. If not, three or four times per week. As usual, no one else I worked with was interested in coffee. But I liked the idea that, even if I wasn’t specifically managing anyone, and I wasn’t specifically a QC tester, no one had tabs on my whereabouts as an in-between apparition.
The ghost moth.
Those nights with skin like winter, though. My personal Third Circle of Hell. Traitors to benefactors frozen in the Ice Lake of Cocytus, with Satan himself chewing on the worst traitors at the center.
I had already gone through a divorce, and I had already done a stint as a divorcee crashing in a sad, cliché studio apartment. By this segment of my reality, I had chosen to move back into my parents’ house in Manteno in order to pay down marital debt and hopefully develop new monetary savings.
Absolutely no offense is rendered toward my mom and dad. But it just wasn’t for me. I lasted three months at my parents’ basement before I just up and moved again. BUT – during a window of time I was QC Manager at Lynwood Grade Separation I was also a depressed refugee in the below ground perfunctory living quarters of mom and dad’s abode.
I would literally avoid going home. I ultimately felt dejected and highly embarrassed. At a certain point my only goal was to go there right before my bedtime and then leave as soon as I could during the morning. I think to a certain degree, the avoidance aspect helped me to cope with my dismal decisions leading up to the arrangement.
I’d get off work in Lynwood, and I’d usually find a beer bar around the border or in Indiana. 75% of the time I’d end up at 3 Floyds brewpub in Munster. Honestly, I went to 3 Floyds so much, the bartenders knew who I was. At a given point I had to not go there because I felt silly about how much I went there. I’ve even toured the strange war memorial at night there in the industrial park where 3 Floyds resides.
I went to Beer Geeks in Highland, that somehow had Pleasant House Royal Pies. I went to one-off chain places that had extensive beer handles but questionable food. I went to Tribes in Mokena a LOT.
Windmill Brewing in Dyer. Flossmoor Station.
I recall exploring Crown Point, Indiana and visiting Crown Brewing circa 2014. I mean, you name it. If it was in the circumference of like twenty miles from Lynwood, IL, I had that tap list locked down.
Some nights I just went to a park and sat and listened to music alone.
Other nights I’d sit in my raggedy ass McDubh truck smoking cigars, just listening to season one of the Serial podcast. Anything to stave off the idea of going to my parents’ place and having my dad ask me, “where ya been?”
So, I then got a two-bedroom apartment in Manteno, Illinois. I did this in order to be geographically closer to a girl I was obsessed with. It’s not like that. I wasn’t a stalker, I promise –
We had dated previously for about six months, and we were talking about potentially picking things back up again after our romantic break. She has a daughter, and at the time the daughter was about six. The idea was (from my end) that I’d establish some level of commitment by stashing myself and my belongings in Manteno, the town I went to high school in, and the worst town I could ever imagine living in. This may be an indicator of how much I wanted to get back with her.
As my depression mounted in The Fourth Circle, so did the snow. Those early mornings clearing snow off the crappy work truck, mounded up like giant marshmallows in the bed, send me back to a spiral. Interstitial memories of studying for the Certified Welding Inspectors exam on the carpeted floor of my Manteno apartment, with homemade cue cards, and going to work in Lynwood make for a mosaic of regret and sheer boredom.
My Manteno two-bed wasn’t bad at all. It was just way too big for me. The cavernous rooms and high ceilings made me feel tiny as my belongings, which post-divorce, did not add up to much. I got a model A-1 pathetic bachelor couch from IKEA. I taught myself to roast coffee beans in that apartment. Sending chaff floating to the air, with no ventilation, I gave the place a pleasant Maillard reaction scent for weeks.
As the Lynwood job wound down, I’d report to our other ongoing IDOT job, Stony Island Feeder. This was a major project where most of the Infrastructure Team was stationed.
Winding flyovers and bridge decks, laytex overlays, and parapet walls. Buckets and cranes and MSE wall. All kinds of things going on there.
The project manager of this Fifth Circle of Hell had a DUI, so he had everyone else drive him around the job site since he wasn’t legally able to operate a vehicle. The scenario reminded me of the town sheriff in Funny Farm.
He used to give me and this other dude a company credit card, and he’d send us to a grocery store to buy piles and stacks of food for everyone in the field office. The grocery list was absolutely nuts. Everything you can think of to grill or put in the freezer. Candy, Ice Cream, burgers, hot dogs, pop, Monster drinks, all types of stuff. I went on one grocery run by myself, and the PM complained, griping at me, telling me I didn’t buy enough food.
Come to think of it, with this alone being the only overhead bill I knew of, among Beelzebub knows what else, I suppose I’m not too shocked the entire Infrastructure Group eventually was shot completely to the netherworld after pretending they were on Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island. It no longer exists.
When I first got to Stony Island, I didn’t have anything to do so I was browsing the McDubh company website. This annoyed my boss. He was like, “what are you doing?”
I said, “just trying to be productive.”
He’s like, “well knock it off!”
If there was ever a job in existence where you had nothing to do, and close to zero certifiable value, and you were just trying to simply learn more about the company that hired you, and your boss made you feel like an idiot for doing so – this would be the role for you!
This one other dude, who reminded me of Dwight Schrute, got bullied like nothing I’d ever seen. Just constant ragging on this guy because he was a foreigner who spoke with a dialect. One time our boss took his office chair and his computer and tossed everything out into the parking lot. Just for a laugh, I guess.
So, you know… it wasn’t enough to hear racist slurs and low brow, predictable commentary in sexism all god damn day, but then I had to witness bully culture on top of it.
My boss would wear camouflage, and he’d bring his big ass dog into the office a lot of days. That thing was humungous, like the dog from The Sandlot. I didn’t trust it for one second. I was always ready for that thing to snap at me and then I’d be forced to monkey stomp it, further ensuring that I’d be shot by my boss who definitely had concealed firearms in the office.
This one day the fucking monster dog barfed up something that looked like an animal. It was disgusting. It looked like a squid, but it was the size of a large rodent. Just a slime-caked alien that the dog ingested and then its stomach rejected in a deluge of regurgitated bile and hair.
My boss picked that fuzzy placenta off the floor with a paper towel and laid it on this other guy’s desk. I could not fucking believe it. Not in a good way. I couldn’t believe it, in a completely horrified way. An un-fun, objectionable breach of space and a personal affront. If that happened to me, I would have probably quit right then and there.
I ran bridge deck pours on Stony Island. But all that really meant was that I was testing air entrainment for every single load of concrete that arrived and making sure the results were good enough to send the trucks to the pump. It was a lot of keeping track of the results and letting the people on top of the deck know the load number and what the results were. I absolutely hated it. Fifteen hour days from the crack of sunrise, well past the time the sun vanished to the cold night.
…
When Stony Island wrapped up, the QC division of the Infrastructure Group moved to the McDubh yard in West Chatham, bordering West Englewood. 76th Street and Vincennes.
The 666 Hypocenter: The Sixth Circle of Hell.
The entire yard was caged in barbed wire chain link, so honestly, I suppose that helped my sense of security by some measure. Hoarders and spendthrifts jousting about adjacent to the locked gates. Tales of murder and car jackings going on around me. Medieval form concocted from the wreckage of the arch-satyr Pan.
We worked out of a trailer in this yard. My boss got a handicapped port-o-potty so that we’d have that double-wide pleasure of dropping a deuce with a lot of room. He installed a space heater, too, so while it was cold outside, the poop was kept nice and warm with that distinct stench of abhorrence.
There was a company of shit-head laborers called Chicago Board Up, and every single day, they’d gather at the McDubh yard gate and drink beer, eat fast food, and toss all of their trash on the ground there. Just mounds of garbage with zero thought given to perhaps finding a dumpster to dispose of it in.
My boss used to blast Metallica and Korn while he sat down to type out emails of rage to engineers and suppliers or whoever else annoyed him. The Dwight Schrute guy would sit at his computer as well, bobbing his head along in agreeance with the ensuing metal mayhem. I couldn’t help but shudder with complete and total embarrassment.
…
When I was breaking strength cylinders in the trailer, I had to adjust the weight thing because I was switching from a small cylinder to a big cylinder. For some reason I just thought I could support the weight with one hand while I unscrewed the other thing with my other hand.
When the weight was loosened, it dropped about 12-inches, right down on my hand, breaking my finger.
Shortly after that I was assigned nuclear density testing duties at 35th Street Pedestrian Bridge for CDOT. Just picture all the glitz of the bridge itself, and Lakeshore Drive, and Lake Michigan being zapped away. That was what was left. Me, working seven nights per week in The Seventh Circle. A troll under the existing, rickety ass bridge, broken finger in a splint, doing density on sand as City Lights placed precast Utilidor Duct in the dark.
Just stuck in a subterranean shit hole with a bunch of morons, night after night after night. I was offered no overtime pay for extended hours. I never wanted to do the math but I’m sure after all of the ridiculous hours, my pay rate was probably hovering at twenty bucks.
The electricians with City Lights were so mean, they had an apprentice that quit outright because they razzed and bullied him so brutally. I saw the situation the very moment he walked off and left his job. He was bent over doing something he was supposed to be doing, and they spray painted a target on his ass. Just fucked up his jeans he was wearing. Then they started kicking him in the ass, thinking it was hilarious.
He was like fuck this shit. Done. Walked right off.
I met this McDubh PM Peter Gao at 35th Street Pedestrian Bridge. Man, that guy was gung-fucking-ho (before he got himself removed from the job). He used to jump in and start performing work as if he was a laborer. He loved it. He was this Type A, brilliant, educated, Asian, enthusiastic young bachelor male who just had the world at his fingertips.
Sadly enough, I used to go on runs to pick up equipment from McCann that Peter Gao ordered for his construction crew. In a strange dichotomy, I reviled this idea that I was an errand boy for Peter Gao, this eccentric kid who was every bit of ten years my younger.
But on the opposite side of the coin, I hated my fucking job, and making these runs just meant that I could escape for a bit on my own, go on a drive, listen to music, get lunch, and bide my time before my inevitable exit.
I heard from my boss that Peter Gao once expressed lament in domineering alpha pitch about me that, “that guy’s life is SO sad!” This was because A, I was divorced, and B, I went to college for accounting and ended up being a schlub who had to go pick up gloves and shovels from a store for Peter Gao.
It’s like, fuck Peter Gao, man. I didn’t need any of his fabricated gossip-pity.
…
I worked with this other dude, Lee. Way too much.
Lee was an odd mashup of things. A very complex man. By that, I mostly mean he had at least two undiagnosed personality disorders. He should have gone to get a formal education, but he opted for auto mechanic school. It’s hard to describe, but when he spoke to me, he had this overwhelming sense of insecurity that was almost tangibly, and definitely comically offset by strange passive aggressive macho comments.
I made more money than him (barely), and I had a title that he thought he deserved. And perhaps he did deserve. I don’t know. He would crack jokes about how I’d wear a collared shirt to work. Which isn’t a hard task. Just go to Goodwill, dude. You can outfit your entire work wardrobe for twelve dollars.
He’d just go ahead and drop N-bombs, for some reason assuming I’d be okay with that. He’d splice the N-bombs in these sort of twisted, fabricated logical fallacy statements. But then, one minute later he would try to group himself with me as some sort of duo who understood art culture.
For example, my desktop background was a photo from the band M83. He mentioned it, and when I expressed surprise that he knew what M83 was, he acted highly offended. It’s like, sorry, man. I’ve been around construction since 1999 and literally nobody ever knows any of the music I’m interested in.
I didn’t get it at the time, but he used to hang out in the office, after hours so he could watch movies on his laptop. The impression I got was that his wife assumed he was working overtime. I mean to be fair, I fully get this now. At the time I felt like it was sad and ridiculous.
One day he brought beer into the office so he could kick back and watch Netflix with a cold one while the wife assumed he testing concrete. He was so insistent that I have a beer with him. I’m just like, yo… (In my head) – I get that you can’t go out anywhere due to your kids. But I’m just this solo guy who can go anywhere – literally anywhere and get a drink.
Namely I can go anywhere that isn’t located inside a barbed wire cage in West Chatham next to a giant port-o-potty. It isn’t worth even the minimal risk to start drinking in the office trailer.
For your information, Lee, if you’re going to even tempt me… if you’re even going to scratch the surface… you better be coming with a barrel aged Dark Lord, and not a sixer of Coors Lite.
…
Then I was helping with another horrible project of the Abyss. Norfolk Southern 47th Street Intermodal Terminal. Just west of the Dan Ryan. The Eighth Circle of Hell, located directly between the Three Rivers of the Underworld.
The McDubh manager guy, a complete sack of shit, tended the Vestibule of the Stygian Marsh. Something Peters, or Peter-less, I don’t recall his name. The Inferno itself was just in some crumbling rail yard, where I was yet again testing concrete, but this time while trying to keep vigilant for people who would try to break into my truck and steal my laptop.
I might pinpoint this noteworthy project as the lowest of the low in terms of my entire career.
Lee was always talking about how shitty his truck was. I swear he calculated a car accident on purpose in order to speed up the process of getting a new truck. He was waiting at the intersection at 47th Street and the viaduct, near the lake of boiling blood. He was biding his time until he saw the perfect opportunity.
He saw an oncoming car near the rail yard, with a girl behind the wheel who was texting and driving. She was traveling slow enough where he figured no one would die, but fast enough to create ample vehicle damage. God knows how long he circled the intersection before he was able to establish the perfect scenario.
He hit the gas at the Plain of Burning Sand, and turned left in front of her, giving just enough time for the end of his truck to be smashed by the oncoming vehicle. Of course he would never admit this was his goal, and of course I can’t be 100% sure. But after working with him for almost a year, my math yielded this as the actual sum. And he got his new truck shortly after.
I accidentally texted Lee a few years ago. I was trying to message a different “Lee”, who had pulled his back out after trying to pet a sloth.
As soon as I saw that I did this, I became stricken with panic and regret. His response in asking “who is this?” implied that he no longer had my number stored. I’ve never been so thankful in all my pitiful existence.
…
During this time of wasting away in the West Chatham trailer office, I passed the CWI exam as well as IDOT PCC Level III.
Then we got awarded The Ninth Concentric Circle Interchange of Hell, soon to become the newly christened Jane Burn Interchange. The Spaghetti Bowl – a part where no thing gleams. Our contract was the flyover that went north from Taylor Street and led over to I-290 West.
It was around this time I noticed my boss working on his resume. I knew that McDubh was bidding on job after job and we were not being awarded any work, letting after letting. I can’t be sure, but I’m assuming part of the issue was both the five-hundred dollar per week grocery bill overhead cost, and the missing salvageable material shrinkage write-downs that were being spread over every bid item.
I felt the signs shifting even more. I somehow knew my boss had the nuc gauge registered in his name instead of the company’s. I just had a feeling if he left, everything remaining would completely go to shit. I started polishing up my own resume. I was not going to ride anything out and I was not motivated to share any of the fate.
I started testing concrete for pier footings and caissons at 290 as still the faux-QC technician status I could not escape. Our subcontractor foreman for Michels yelled at me because I needed to hold up concrete trucks due to product that was out of spec.
After he yelled at me in front of onlookers, I shot a look at him and I’m like “dude, don’t fucking talk to me like that.” I was ready to throw down. I had had it. He was my sub, yet he thought I was just a tester, and I was finished with having these assholes not knowing their god damn place. I was mentally done testing concrete like a pawn in some fake ass game.
I started to flex all of the contacts I had created over the years. I talked to Vinod who was Materials Coordinator for Omega at Circle Interchange. I talked to Mike Rodak who was Materials Coordinator for Ardmore on Stony Island. These two gentlemen were my Saint Lucia figures – symbols of illuminating grace.
I was always the one person on the McDubh Infrastructure QC team who tried to be cordial and accommodating, as opposed to operating like a complete dick head, or a robot, so I was already seen as a candidate.
I talked to people on the CTR watermain inspection program at City of Chicago Department of Water who I had worked with in the past.
Luckily, it shuffled by more quickly than I had anticipated. I got one interview with Pedro and Chris May at the CTR 1440 North Kingsbury basement office. I showed up after a PM shift at Circle Interchange after spending the night watching painters paint overpasses.
I’m positive my eyes were bloodshot, but I arrived as kempt as I possibly could. I definitely explained that I had been working all night, which seemed to alleviate concern that I had merely been at a bar until 4AM, etc.
I got a second interview at the downtown office of Ardmore & Associates. Between these two entities I would be offered a role with Ardmore, and I’d be working for Pedro on the CTR joint venture at DWM.
When I put in my two weeks with my boss I told him I was going to CTR. Which was true. But I was aware that most people thought CTR was an actual company, as opposed to a JV.
After a few days, he heard I was going to Ardmore. I lied and acted like that wasn’t the case. I knew that he hated Ardmore since they had the Materials Coordinator role for Stony Island – a recipient of a lot of his heavy metal rage emails.
Honestly, if he knew I was quitting to go to Ardmore, I was afraid he would put on a Slipknot song, turn it up to eleven, toss all my shit out in the parking lot and then send his monster dog after me.
Chopper, sic balls.
…
At my exit interview, the HR rep was most certainly trying to get more information from me. I could tell that she knew there was a no-man’s land of secrecy going on in Infrastructure and she wanted the info. She needed the info.
I could have shared everything. I shared nothing.
I made it sound like it was great. This is the economic reality we live in. The capitalistic game drove me to lie and merely state that I had another opportunity. As far as I was concerned, my reasons for leaving that team behind were no longer any of my god damn concern.
I’d never take the mark of that beast, and I felt elation in jumping from the pristine looking Titanic.
Either way, it was then I’d gear up to head to the other side – working for an engineering firm.
