Commitment

The boss reached across the table and handed me a manila folder.  “This,” he said with an edge of gravitas to his tone that was a beyond his normal cadence, “is how a project handoff is supposed to go.”  Several months earlier, my first project had been handed to me by necessity due to a flurry of tragedies striking the company at one time.  When the dust settled, there was a project that needed managing and the only one available to handle it was me.  What followed was a wild ride on the crash course of project management.  But while I rode out the turns and loops on that wild ride, the company was slowly righting itself in the wake of multiple health emergencies in key leadership and loss of supporting personnel.  Now, very near the end of that first project, I was sitting in the conference room directly opposite my boss, receiving my next project folder.

He was right, this time was very different.  The project had a clear set of budgets for me to work from, there was a list of recommended subcontractors, a window list, a door list, a lumber list; everything I didn’t have from the first project, and everything I needed for a good launch and a good schedule.  I felt the heavy weariness that had haunted me over the course of that first project sloughing off as I reviewed the contents of this folder.  With this tool kit in hand, and the hard-won experience I had earned over the last four wild months, I could do this, and I could do it well.

Still, I procrastinated starting the project.  I set up my subs, wrote out their contracts, set up my materials, and set up my schedule, but I could not bring myself to set the actual start date.  The project was a small addition on an easily accessible side of a large house in and area I was quite familiar with.  The owners were nice, reasonable people, the house was not particularly old, was plumb and square, and everything was ready to go.  But when I looked at the large, clean stucco wall that was all but begging me to put a hammer through it, pressure rose in my chest and I could feel the blood hammering in my temples.  What would I find under that stucco?  What had I forgotten?  I felt very confident in my management of the world of known challenges, but what of the ones that remained unknown?  I had just navigated several months of constant engagement with my own lack of knowledge and experience.  I had fought well, but the process had been humbling and at times, humiliating.  Maybe I was better prepared this time, but I was still firmly in touch with my own weaknesses, had no illusions over my still very novice experience level, and knew that it was the unknowns that are the hardest challenges to overcome.

There was a safety here standing and looking at the stucco, but not busting into it.  Here on the outside I could make myself busy poring over the plans, budgets, lists, and contracts, forcing myself to find more details that I could convince myself needed more thought and organization before I started.  Once I actually swung the hammer through the stucco, I was at the mercy of the project.  Whatever I had missed would be revealed in time; exposed by the exacting and relentless hand of the project.  Furthermore, when that first blow pierced the diaphragm of the wall, the house was open and made vulnerable to the elements, and there would be no stopping until the addition was built and the wall was sealed back up around it.  To strike the first blow was to make real the commitment to see the project to a finished state and devote myself to solving all of the problems that arose within; those seen and unseen.  It was safe, comfortable, and easy to procrastinate here on this side of the project, but every form of progress lay on the far more uncertain opposite side of that hammer blow.

It took a few minutes dedicated time for me to actually define the fears and concerns that kept me in the relative safety of preconstruction limbo, but eventually I was able to name the problem accurately as a fear of commitment.  Given my limited and recent chaotic experience managing projects, my fears very rationally longed for the level of safety and comfort of that preconstruction limbo.   Yet another part of me knew that the security in inactivity was temporary at best, and largely illusory.  The only real path was forward.  Once those fears and concerns had been named, it was not hard at all for me to adjust my grip on the 8 pound sledge and drive it right through the stucco.  We were under way, and it felt good.  Of course there are no promises that the project wouldn’t go south five minutes after initiation and certainly no guarantees that I wouldn’t fail and fall headlong, but I was as well prepared as I knew to be, I was surrounded by an excellent supportive cast, and when you think about it, most promises for comfort and security are illusory anyways; to live is to risk. 

That project went very well.  The owners were some of the sweetest I’ve ever worked for; they brought us coffee every morning and sweets in the afternoons.  They gave us nicknames (I was Smiley) and when the project was over, they gave me a collage of photos they had taken of us working on the house as a visual record of the whole achievement.  It didn’t go perfectly; we had to set insulation in 114 degree weather, we broke a window in transport, and I made a mistake installing the stain grade window trim, but when the problems came up, we found them and fixed them and the finished product was neat, clean, on budget, and almost on time.

To this day, the image of that unbroken stucco wall remains a symbol of commitment in my head.  My process working through that dilemma was pivotal in my maturation, and indeed some five years after the completion of this project, I drew deeply from this when I made the largest commitment of my life.  My wife and I celebrate our tenth anniversary this month, and our shared endeavor has proven itself to be the greatest adventure of our lives.  It’s a gift, and I’m grateful for any and all of my experiences that brought me to the place where I was willing to step through my fears and freely engage in a new and scary level of commitment.

Working in the Hills

Years ago, when I was working for Dave, he landed a project some twenty miles east of town, off Highway 166.  Once you left the highway, you still had another ten minutes of gravel roads with three creek crossings before reaching the work site, which sat on a river bench in the middle of the canyon carved by that creek over the past several millennia.  We framed that project late in the fall; the roofing was rolled on as the first drops of the rainy season began falling, and we worked on the siding and finishes through the winter and into the early spring. 

It was beautiful on that backwoods property.  We sat and ate lunch under their carport, admiring the rocky cliffs jutting up from the opposite side of the creek, and wondered where the endless lines of game trails through the thickets of sage, manzanita, and poison oak might take us if we started exploring.  We saw coyotes and bobcats skirting the dirt road fairly frequently on our early morning drives, there was an abundance of quail, mourning dove, and songbirds, more than a few species of hawk, and one morning we were lucky enough to spot what I’m quite certain was an eagle. 

It was a wet winter, and it was cold back in that canyon.  One particularly cold day, we were milling door trim in the garage.  We were protected from the rain, but there was no garage door yet, and the room was uninsulated.  Even with gloves and layers, our spoiled Central Coast bodies were not used to temperatures under 50 degrees, so we struggled to keep ourselves warm.  Then partway through the day we noticed the raindrops had slowed way down in their descent from the clouds, had gone from grey to white, and were now dusting the ground with gentlest shroud of snow.  Our sensibilities were scrambled by the complete context break of snow on the Central Coast, so we spent the next 15 minutes trying to collect enough of the rare substance to make one gross, brown ice ball and then fight over who got to throw it at whom.  I don’t remember exactly how it ended, but I don’t remember having to clean dirty ice-snow off my hair and clothes before going back to work.  I can’t speak for anyone else.

When it got really wet, we lost access to the project; the water levels of the creek raised too deep at the points the road forded it to risk driving through.  I remember one day in early spring Dave sent me out alone to work on some interior finishes.  The forecast was for a full day of rain at the end of a long week of rain.  The fords were already about as high as my little truck could handle, and Dave warned me: “if it starts raining hard, get out before the creek goes up too far for you to be able to leave.”  But how much rain is enough rain to raise the crossings?  Neither of us knew, so I spent the day watching the fall rate of the rain closely, caught between not wanting to wimp out and cash in early when I could have stayed, and earnestly hoping I wasn’t being a total idiot and stranding myself on the jobsite until God knows when.  All through that day, I remember there was a bluebird flitting around the property, dipping in and out of the trees and letting himself be seen every half hour or so when I would check on the rain again.  Something about that beautiful cobalt blue plumage darting in and around the wet grey world gave me hope, and I thought (perhaps foolishly) that as long as I could spot that bluebird, I would be able to get back across the creek.  Sure enough, when 4PM came, I said farewell to the bluebird, and my tough little truck swamped right through the crossings and took me home safe.

Later that spring, the temperatures started rising quickly, the ground dried out, and the emerald green of the hills began to soften into the golden-brown they wear for the majority of the year.  As the site dried off, Dave and I were able to uncover the lumber pile and start assembling some exterior beam work we’d been waiting all spring for an opportunity to do.  When we removed the tarps that had protected our lumber from the rain, we were startled by a rat that jumped out from the beams and scampered away.  Then, as we moved the last beam, we found a perfect little grass nest hidden in a hollow of the earth, dry and safe under the pile of beams and tarps.  In the nest were six, tiny, still blind baby rats, left alone by their terrified mother.  Now I enjoy fishing and hunting and I am not intimidated by the process of killing animals, butchering, and eating them.  In that detailed practice of pursuit, one cannot help but admire the beauty, strength, and grace of one’s prey in its natural habitat.  There is a sacred respect in the intentional harvest of a game animal.  However, exposing a nest of helpless baby animals to die by whatever means nature sees fit to dole out, even if they are just rats, has none of that honor; it’s simply sad.  We left the nest and moved on to our workday, taking care to ignore and hopefully forget all about that small tragedy in the grass.

Dave left early that day to finish up in the office, and eventually quitting time came for me too.  As I walked to my truck, I remembered the nest and I detoured my way towards it.  Maybe the mama-rat had come back for them; one could hope.  If she hadn’t, it seemed wrong for me to leave them to die slowly of exposure to the cold night, or the hot sun of tomorrow.  I didn’t know what I would do; maybe fill the nest with water or dirt and give the babies a quicker death.  Even that seemed wrong.  I had no plan.  But when I arrived at the nest, I found that nature had already solved my problem.  Easing his way out of the nest was a substantial gopher snake, and as he slithered his 40-inch-plus length away from the hole, I could count six neat, even spaced lumps working their way down his body, the last of which was still only an inch or so from the snake’s mouth.  I followed him for some twenty yards to the fence line, admiring the way his body glided gracefully along the earth, winding effortlessly away into the tall grass, even so encumbered by his recent gluttony.  A shiver rolled down my back.  Even a harmless snake like a gopher snake is still just a little bit creepy.  I took one last look at the empty nest, then climbed in my truck and took my leave.  Nature is a weird and wonderful thing.

Art in the Trades

One of my cousins is a fantastic woodworker (Jileswoodworks.com).  As a kindred spirit with a passion for fine carpentry myself, when we get together, it’s very easy for us to ramble on for hours of conversation around the craft; from tools to materials and everything random rabbit trail and cul de sac in between.  Seth is what I would call an artist.  Like any skilled craftsman, he works with the smooth hands of one whose strength has been finely tuned to his work by years of repetition, but his best work carries a certain creativity and ingenuity that goes beyond craftsmanship and into artistry.  He is brilliant and innovative.

Yet in our shop talk, we often come back to a very important theme; the economics of the art.  Very few people are actually willing to pay for an artist, and rightfully so.  The art exists in the mind (or soul if you want to get metaphysical about it) of the artist.  If you really want art, you must essentially pay for a creative to execute his own will, and not conform to any vision of your own.  This either requires a sponsor who is willing to pay for scores of pieces that fall short of excellence in order to earn the one that transcends, or it requires the artist to create in his own time and at his own expense until he grinds out in sweat and blood, a piece that is recognized for the art that it is.

Once upon a time, I would have thought of myself as an artistic type.  But my trade, the job is to develop and execute someone else’s vision, not my own.  As a result, my creativity is often limited to the context of the desires and needs of my customer.  This can at times be stifling if I let it get to me; I rarely work for someone who likes the things I like or wants to do the things I want to do; and every so often, I am hired to build and install something that flatly don’t like the aesthetics of.  I am much less of an artist than my cousin, so this tension is less of a problem for me than it might be for him, but it does lurk in the background, and raise its head every so often and drive me to evaluate the dueling identities of aloof artist, and savvy capitalist.

In the end, it’s the savvy capitalist who pays the bills, so I do what I’m asked, and to the best of my abilities, I execute the visions of other people.  Yet all the while, I take notes, lock away the things that I discover that I like, and I save them for later.  Maybe one day when I remodel my own home, I’ll get to let my inner artist out of the backseat and let him drive for a while.

But in the meantime, I’ve been surprised by the beauty that I find my role as executer of other people’s vision.  Even with an excellent road map (as I am often provided with, by designers, architects, and homeowners), I have found that there is a little recognized skill in the art of articulating and applying design, that I have learned and developed over the last several years.  It requires some level of technical knowledge of the materials, processes, and tools, but much more it requires the ability to hear the customer’s needs, often through a miasma of misunderstanding.  Folks might know what they want, but not know how to describe it, explain it, or understand if it’s even possible to get it.  It is an absolute delight when a customer comes to me with some kind of vague idea of what might be neat to have, and then by means of a lot of careful listening and rephrasing, consideration of my accrued technical and structural knowledge, and then with even more careful execution, be able to provide a delighted customer with a feature that is wholly unique to themselves.

Similarly, I find myself surprised by the beauty of clean, tight work.  When the critical path of a schedule flows without interruption, with each contractor weaving in and out of the job fluidly around each other, never interrupting each other’s work, it’s wonderful to feel and observe.  When the job ends and all surfaces are clean, tight, flat, plumb, and square, and every finish and reveal noticed and properly attended to, even if the finishes aren’t the ones I have chosen, I can very much appreciate the beauty of the completed whole. 

Finally, and probably least surprising, I find myself delighted by the beauty in the team of people I get to work with.  I have long felt that construction is a very sensible industry – a customer wants a particular product, and they hire me to provide it.  I then in turn hire the team that I need to bring that product into being and seek out the vendors from whom I can procure the necessary materials.  With kindness, clear and proper communication, and a willingness to understand, there is no reason why everyone shouldn’t get what they need and want.  Still, it’s impossible to build a quality team without encountering some folks who simply do not properly mesh with the vision and process I aim to provide, so we go our separate ways.  Maybe it’s the people of the Central Coast, or maybe it’s people in general, but even these instances seem to be rare and not particularly painful, and the resulting team, from the smiling vendors behind cash registers, to the owners who sign my checks, I have been surprised by the capability and beauty of the team around me.

Maybe I have not become an artist as I might have once envisioned an artist to be, but in pursuing the humble and earthy needs of income and shelter, I may have actually stumbled on a hidden artistry I never knew existed.  If an artist’s goal is to attempt to create, engineer, steward, and delight in beauty, then I count myself privileged enough to be one.

Never Going Back

Juan was late to work that Monday, a very rare occurrence.  He had been working for me for over a year, doing the hard, hot, messy work of making low pressure injection molded poly-urethane branches for cell phone towers (in order to dress them up to look like trees).  It was early 2013, and telecom was one of the few, still booming industries (as opposed to my native construction, which was still trying to get back up from a beat down by the Great Recession).

I had hired Juan on a hope and a prayer.  His past was no secret - most of it was scrawled or stamped across his body in tattoo form.  He had Oakland Raiders logos, scantily clad ladies, Spanish quotations, and a few other pictures and landscapes coating his hands and arms.  A cryptic code was stamped across his knuckles, the tail of some kind of lizard or snake curled up from his shirt collar and wrapped around his left ear, and two double digit numbers marked his face, just outside of both eyes.  He was about 5'6” with a muscular build, dark skinned, kept his black hair buzzed short, and when he was concentrating, his face rested to an intimidating scowl.

Juan had gained an interview through the intercession of his supervisor in a faith-based addiction recovery program who happened to be a friend of my mother’s.  His supervisor had been working with him for several months and had seen in him a real willingness to leave his twelve years of drug addiction and gang violence for good.  When my mother’s friend heard I was in need of entry level labor, she called right away: our work was perfect for giving Juan the second chance he needed.  The pay was not great, but it was hard, steady work that would look good on a resumé after two years of consistent performance.  Furthermore, outside of basic safety apparel, appearances in our messy warehouse did not matter, and the tattoos that would keep him out of most other jobs were a non-issue.  She also knew that I held a great respect for those fighting their way out of addiction and might grant a chance where another employer might not.

When Juan first walked in, it was difficult to see past the tattoos and the obvious signs of past gang involvement.  But his collared shirt and pressed pants were clean and well fitting, his handshake was firm, and he spoke clearly and directly; understanding and answering all of my questions promptly and honestly.  Without my knowledge of his addiction history and criminal record, I might not have pondered at all, but brought him in immediately.   But I was still responsible for managing millions of dollars worth of equipment, tooling, and sales.  Sure, we had practices to protect ourselves from potentially thieving employees, but I needed to build some sort of reconciliation between my desire to give Juan the chance he needed, while providing my boss the security and productivity he needed.

But that reconciliation was soon swallowed by a massive work order with an impossible deadline.  Juan was in, for no other reason than the fact that I needed bodies, and I needed them yesterday.  The following days mocked my hesitation as I was constantly rewarded by my decision to hire Juan.  He learned quickly and accurately, needing one clear explanation and little other guidance.  He had an aptitude with tools that allowed him to work quickly and safely, and within a month his productivity rivaled the top workers in the shop.  He arrived early every day to stretch and sip coffee half an hour before the doors opened and was always eager for an opportunity to work overtime.  For the first three months of his employment, we had to deal with state mandated random drug tests as a result of the penance he was still paying for his past drug use.  He would receive a text on his phone, and if he was not at the government office within an hour, he was in some form of violation.  These were inconvenient when they happened mid workday, but Juan was happy to come make up hours whenever possible, and eventually these tests petered out as he passed them and fulfilled his requirements. 

Over the next year and a half, Juan became my top warehouse worker, eventually becoming a supervisor of our most difficult manufacturing department.  The rest of the office staff and myself had the privilege of helping Juan navigate through the process of gaining custody of his kids from foster care (their mother's whereabouts unknown; still deep in addiction).  Life for Juan was much tougher once he brought his boys home, but he had some help from his family, and was determined that his kids should have a father who was active in their lives.  We did what we could to help him out wherever possible; giving him extra hours, cash bonuses, paid days off, personal projects, and help planning for the future.  He was advancing rapidly through the warehouse ranks, and all of us quietly wondered where he could go from here.

It was in this time that Juan hit a plateau.  He had made supervisor, but that was the top position we could offer him; the next jump was to warehouse manager, which was one of the several hats I currently wore, and at our growth rate we would not be able to turn that role into a full-time position for another couple years.  In the meantime, the cost of living in California as a single dad kept him from developing any kind of long-term financial stability and security.  He continued to grind, but the effects of the constant effort were beginning to show, and his positive attitude that was once so easy and free became a product of strength and will.  I watched carefully.  I have worked closely with folks who have battled various forms of addiction, and I know that these plateaus are the moments when relapse is the easiest.  I encouraged Juan any chance I could get and sought opportunities to lighten his load, give him bonuses, and push him through the grind wherever I could. 

Juan was in the middle of this plateau when he showed up late to work on Monday with no notice.  My radar went up immediately.  He was quiet when he arrived; apologized, promised to make up the hours, and went straight to work.  On Tuesday he showed on time, but his quiet, brooding temperament, that was so out of character, persisted.  That afternoon I checked his production numbers and saw he was clearly lagging from his normal pace.  He did not act like someone in a drug relapse, but he was clearly off for some reason.  As I sat pondering how to best address this, Juan stuck his head into my office. 

            “Can I talk to you boss?” 

I invited him in and asked him what was up.  He was clearly not himself.  His shoulders slumped, and his face was locked in the concentration of someone in deep pain.  Quietly, with as little movement as possible, he explained that he had a severe tooth ache, and it was difficult for him to perform to his full strength.  Methamphetamine is notorious for wrecking the teeth of its users, and years of consistent use had left Juan's teeth in bad shape.  On Sunday night, two of his molars had literally disintegrated in his mouth midway through his meal.  The nerves were fully exposed, and every movement was excruciating.  He had not eaten anything, he hardly talked, and drinking water was blindingly painful.  I immediately leapt to my feet,

            “We've got to get you to a dentist”

            “I can't afford it, boss.  There's a CHC dental clinic on Saturday that is free.  Aside from that, I     can get painkillers from the Emergency Room.  That's it.”

While Juan sat silently with the vacant look of someone resigned to great pain, I spent the next hours on the internet and phone to friends and acquaintances, trying to find someone who would let Juan into their office.  I would vouch, I would pay; we would figure it out.  I have a thing about teeth.  I have been haunted by dreams of my teeth crumbling in my head and have had plenty of chipped teeth and cavities myself; I could not stand the thought of someone having to sit in this condition for the rest of the week.  After a some time, I had exhausted all the resources I could think of and we were no better off.

            “I guess we've got to get you to the ER”

            “I already went boss.  The wanted to give me Norco.  I told them I can't do that.  It's habit            forming, and I'm an addict”

His sentences were short and chopped.  The words squeezed out with as little movement as possible.  He continued,

            “They brought another painkiller.  The one they give that isn't habit-forming.  I told them I can't   do that one either.  For some people it works.  But I've had that drug before, and for me, it's           habit-forming.  So they gave me ibuprofen.  It helps a little.”

I pressed him. 

            “Come on man, you've got to get something.  I'm sure they know what they're talking about.  Are you sure that stuff would be habit forming with you?”

There was a long pause.  Juan had been staring vaguely over my shoulder for most of the conversation.  Obviously, the pain was of far more concern to him than this conversation.  But after my last question lingered in the air for a moment, he shifted, and he looked me squarely in the eyes; the dead look of pain completely evicted by the cold steel of resolve.

            “I'm never going back boss.  I ruined my life once, and I'm not doing it again.”

The words dropped like a rock and sat.  Humbled, I let the weight of that truth resound through the room for several minutes before I could bring myself to respond.

            “What can I do?”

            “I'm ok boss.  I can make it to Saturday.  I just might be a bit slow this week.  I can make up        production for free if you need.  I'm sorry, I'm not full strength, but I just need the money.”

            “Don’t worry about that at all.”

As the week went on, either the pain reduced a bit, or Juan got better at dealing with it, but after our talk, his countenance improved a bit.  Eventually Saturday came; I don’t know what all the dentist had to do, but by Monday, Juan was back to his usual self; singing, laughing, joking, and cranking out product – in all ways behaving like a man delighted to be free.  And free indeed.

It would be nice if the story ended right there.  I worked with Juan for two years, and aside from this one incident, he was always positive, and always grateful.  Positive despite the fact that he would get pulled over at least once a month, and as a result suffered two or three fix it tickets a year – for low tread on tires; for no registration sticker, even though the fee was paid; for a crack in the windshield, etc.  Positive despite the fact that while he worked for me, his cousin, who was still in Juan's previous lifestyle, was brutally murdered by a rival gang.  Positive despite the fact that he was wading through custody battles for his kids, fighting the State who wanted him to still pay crippling amounts of child support to their mother, even while he had full legal custody of the kids: court date after court date he took time from work to argue his case, each iteration robbing him of valuable time and resources.  Occasionally I would challenge him on how he was managing to handle these difficulties.  He'd just shrug and tell me that after the mistakes he had made, he was just grateful to not be dead or in prison.  It was a nice answer for him to give to his boss, but it was obvious to me that the societal barriers set in place to encourage and enforce good behavior had become barricades preventing Juan from escaping from his past.

About a year after this story, after I had moved on to start my own construction company, Juan got pulled over while giving his brother a ride.  Juan's brother had a warrant for his arrest.  The car was searched, and the officers found drugs and an unregistered firearm.  All this news came to me second hand by way of my former employer, so how much Juan was directly involved was never clear to me, but both he and his brother ended up in jail.   At Juan's request, I wrote a letter vouching for his character, but that was the last I heard of or from him for a year or two.  Then one day a friend of mine who is a Sheriff's deputy working at the county jail told me he had a 'customer' who said he knew me.  It was Juan.  I was happy (but not at all surprised) to hear from my buddy that Juan is still sober and clean and is one of the best guys in the jail.  Through the help of my friend, I was able to make contact by way of another of Juan’s brothers and was able to advocate for Juan once more with a character reference for the judge.  Several more years have passed since then, ( and within them, the COVID Pandemic time warp), my buddy at the jail moved away, and I have not heard from Juan since.  I wish him nothing but the best and I hope to see him again one day.  I have never seen a richer demonstration of character than what Juan showed me, but it breaks my heart to know the depth and breadth of (ongoing) suffering it took to reveal it.

What is it All For?

This is the third and final of three essays on my lessons, struggles, and successes in and around time management within the context of running a small construction business.

If someone stepped into my life fifteen years ago, or even ten years ago, and told me that I would soon start and run my own construction business, my younger self would have been very surprised.  I never had a draw to business, never had a knack for making money, and my connection with construction was tied chiefly to the income it provided in times when I needed it most.  In those days ten and fifteen years ago, I saw myself much more as a free spirit, a wanderer, and a surfer.  I prided myself in keeping my costs and my needs low and my life flexible. 

Yet the nomadic life was insufficient for me.  It was lonely and while I loved the flexibility and freedom of the wandering surfer ideal, a part of me also felt as though this lifestyle was actually something of a luxury, and that if I wanted to experience real life, I needed to learn hard work and commitment.  My time as a project manager was my first step into real responsibility, and launched a period of internal conflict, as the part of me desiring maturity and fulfilling work, wrestled with the part of me who longed to be free to step out of my sleeping bag in the back of my pickup truck at dawn and survey the morning surf options with the sun rising at my back.

A couple years into project managing, I met my future wife.  There is nothing quite like family life to bring about maturity, whether one is ready for it or not.  I listened to a lot of sports radio in those days, and one particular broadcaster, Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio put my very struggle in words that I’ll never forget:

“When you’re young, it’s all well and good to say damn the man, and live your life how you want.  But you know what?  Eventually everyone ends up working for the man.  And you know why?  Because he pays well!  Principles and ideals are very important, but when you have a mortgage and three kids, a good steady paycheck is almost as important.” (of course this transcript is from my memory alone so who knows exactly how accurate it is)

True to form, my respect for fulfilling, well-paying work stepped up several notches when a girl stepped into my life.  It went up several more when we got married, and then skyrocketed with the birth of our first son.  All of a sudden, it wasn’t just a fulfilling job I was looking for, but it was a career, maybe even a legacy.  Here was a person that I would be legally responsible for for the next 18 years, and morally and relationally responsible to for the rest of my life.  I was his dad.  Was I a good role model?  Would I be a good representation of male identity?  Indeed, it was when my son was seven months old when I got my license and formed my business.  I became a business owner and my surfboards got dustier while my tools got cleaner.

In my last essay, my typing fingers stumbled on a phrase that I like:  “the great project of my middle years”.  From the very first moment, Hawkes Construction has been the hardest, most fulfilling, most heartbreaking, and most rewarding job I have ever had.  I have loved it and I have hated it, but it has always been interesting.  Back in the days before marriage and kids and business ownership, I dreamed of a time when I might be able to earn ample income working part time, and thereby gain the income of full time employment, while enjoying the flexibility of part time employment, satisfying my desire for flexibility and freedom, my need for income, and my hunger for fulfilling work.  If that model is indeed ever possible for me within Hawkes Construction, it will be some time long in the future, because in my experience thus far, the business always required more time, attention, and lifeblood that I am even able to give it.  Yet I am not disappointed in the least.  The project of my middle years is the vast, fulfilling, maturing, and life-giving work that I needed and wanted.  It’s a challenge worthy of my attention and effort.

But what is it all for?  While I’m reluctant to put concrete examples on paper, I feel that the normal stories of hard driven business owners are far too often stories of broken families and neglected children.  If I cannot be present and active in my children’s lives and maintain my happy and healthy marriage to my beautiful wife, then I will be failing and my first and greatest job. 

The truth is, I don’t always know how to best manage my time.  I know my priorities are always first to my family, then to my business, but I will not be surprised if the details of how these great endeavors are walked out is the work of a lifetime. 

Time is Money

This is the second of three essays on my lessons, struggles, and successes in and around time management within the context of running a small construction business.

In my first year or two of working for myself, I found very quickly that bidding is tricky.  Even with the advantage of having served as an estimator at a large company for a few months, I still struggled to build good, accurate, and reasonable bids.  When bidding, one essentially considers a project deeply, attempts to anticipate every step of work that the project will require, assigns hours, materials, and subcontractor costs to each piece of the project according to a breakdown of trades.  The estimator will then then tally those costs, assign detailed notes each trade (which will become the definition of the project scope), then add a markup for profit and overhead and send it off to be challenged or approved.  It’s much more difficult to bid large complex remodels that might be full of unhelpful secrets waiting to be revealed in that first week of demolition, as opposed to those early days when I was simply trying to consider what it would take to replace the fascia on my neighbor’s house.  Yet the consequences of bad bidding in either case are catastrophic to a business.

Especially in those early days, I would find extra ways to make my bid work challenging.  I was keenly and privately conscious that I did not fit the typical builder mold; I just didn’t know any other construction workers who enjoyed listening to podcast tomes on Roman History while they tore out bathroom tile.  In many ways I embraced that uniqueness and set out to be something different from the average builder, but in other ways, I allowed it to affect my confidence in my abilities, and thereby affect my bids.  Instead of looking at my neighbor’s fascia and thinking about how long it would take me to replace it, I would look at my neighbor’s fascia and consider how long I thought it should take me to replace it.  The standard I used to define what it should take me to do the work was a mythical contractor in my head, born out of my own self esteem issues, who was faster, cleaner, and better than me.  Bidding this way inevitably made problems down the road.  Even when I made no bad cuts and fit the fascia together like a puzzle, I still wasn’t as fast as that perfect mythical contractor in my head that I had used as a basis for my bid price.  As a result, I almost always ended up working late on the day after the day that I had thought I would be done with the project, deeply frustrated by the greatly reduced hourly rate I was now earning. 

Eventually, in an effort to stem the flow of losses streaming from my poor bids, I switched to a time and materials basis.  Since I seemed to have a hard time considering my skills and speed accurately enough to provide a good bid, I instead attempted to set up jobs with a fair market billing rate, and then bill simply and cleanly according to the hours and materials the project took.  In theory, this would cover those lost hours I had given away so many times in my bids; the hours spent picking up lumber, adapting to hidden conditions, and replacing dulled blades.  Yet the specter of my self-esteem still managed to find a way into my income, this time showing up in billing instead of bidding.  In my head, that mythical contractor never made a bad cut, never had to go back to the hardware store to get another piece of fascia or a few more screws, and never went long on a project simply because he was better at my job than I was.  So I wouldn’t bill for hours that I felt I was undeserving of; instead I billed for the time that I thought the job should have taken me rather than the time that the job actually took me. 

I struggled my way quietly through those early years; my issues were humiliating, so I smiled big, worked hard, and gave positive answers every time someone asked how things were going.  And despite my foibles, there was a steady creep of improvement that gave me enough reason to give those positive answers.  A few years into my business, I had improved my planning, and was faster and cleaner in my work, and I had built enough experience to know what things costed and how long they actually took to execute.  With my increased competence came an increased confidence.  Mistakes and inefficiencies felt more like exceptions, and less like rules and my work on the ground was starting to look a lot more like the work of that mythical standard I had set out in the earliest years.  Yet the success of my business, the great project of my middle years, was still heavily reliant upon the hourly rate at which I valued myself, along with all of the surrounding emotional baggage I had imposed upon the process of establishing that value.  Even as that rate and the subsequent income increased, I found myself in an unhappy world of dollars and hours, viewing everything I did through the heavy veil of opportunity cost.  What might have started as a simple evaluation to determine if it was more efficient for me to hire a lawn service than mow the lawn myself, eventually became a cost analysis of every church meeting, vacation, or hobby I entertained.  When I started quietly tallying my hourly rate against the time I spent with my kids, I realized something in my thinking might be deeply unhealthy. 

It was in this time that I was providentially gifted a mentor.  I met him at a class my church offered, where we were paired up by the teacher to discuss the topics of the course over an afternoon.  In the initial perfunctory niceties, my discussion partner and I discovered a lot of common ground.  Some 15- 20 years to my senior, he was also a contractor and he saw in me the rookie that he once was.  We subsequently gave the minimum attention to the class content and devoted the rest of the afternoon to talking shop.  We continued to meet periodically for the next several months before he moved away, and among many other topics, he coached me to a much healthier relationship with time, billing, and home life. 

As a provider of services, my income will always be tied in some way to an hourly rate, which will force me to repeatedly reconcile my relationship between time, money, and ultimately my personal value within that context.  The ability to handle this process in a healthy and successful way demands a level of character and emotional health that I’m not sure I can consistently inhabit and may well take the work of a lifetime to perfect.  There is no way to escape the quirks of my own character, and I still need to manage my own insecurities or suffer business losses due to my own lack of courage.  Yet at the same time, it is imperative that I detach myself from this work and allow myself to be wholly present for the life that exists beyond work.  Time is money, but both are pretty terrible masters.

The Work is Never Done

This is the first of three essays on my lessons, struggles, and successes in and around time management within the context of running a small construction business.

“Now that you guys are managers, you are no longer paid by the hour…” my boss was speaking to another brand new employee and myself, “…you will find a mindset shift in the way you work.  You aren’t working for the end of the day; instead, as a salaried employee, you are working for the end of the project.  You won’t get paid overtime rates the way you used to, and there will be days, and some weekends, when you are required to put in extra hours to keep your project on schedule.  In return, just as I require you to put in the extra time when it’s needed, when you find yourself  completely caught up, you are welcome to take a half or full day for yourself with no change in pay and no charge against your accrued PTO.”

I liked this distinction.  Even as a conscientious worker, there were certainly days as an hourly employee that I spent watching the time way too closely.  When 3:30 came, I was all too ready to drop my tools from whatever I was doing, go collect my surfboard, and hit the waves.  Now as a project manager, my job was to look up from the task oriented mindset of worker, see the project in its entirety, and then, using a variety of strategies and tools, go about completing that project as efficiently and cost effectively as I could.  It was a mindset that suited my strengths, and I liked the idea of going hard when it mattered so I could take vacation when it didn’t matter as much.

As I plowed my way through my first projects as a manager, I discovered the natural ebb and flow of a construction project schedule.  The initial days are very time intensive - from demolition on into the rough trades.  If there is any surprise problem to be discovered, this is when it reveals itself.  Even if there aren’t any unholy surprises, the placement of each rough material from lumber to wire, plumbing and ducting must be placed with calculated consideration of the final design.  Once the rough trades are complete, a project transitions to a bit more of an ebb in the intensity through insulation and into drywall and paint.  These trades require fewer consequential choices, and they rely on materials that have dry times, sometimes long ones.  According to my boss, this was the ideal time to take a vacation.  But one had better be back from vacation on time, because as soon as paint is done, the job gets hot again.  Cabinets, countertops, flooring, finish plumbing, electrical, and appliances follow after paint, and if you are working on a kitchen or a bathroom, it means that your customers are not using that kitchen or bathroom, so you had better hustle those trades through as fast as you can – even if you’re on or ahead of schedule, you can bet those customers are getting tired of being without the critical pieces of their home.  This is also where manager gets to find out where he and his guys did their job well on the rough phase, and where they did not.  The internet is littered with photos of the grotesquely creative solutions folks use to cover the mistakes they made in the rough phases.

In addition to pushing this schedule, project managers are expected to acquire the industry standard three bids for each trade represented in the project, evaluate those proposals as they come in, and request editions to the scope as things are invariably missed or intentionally left out, then ultimately write, amend, and award the subcontracts.  There were also budget reports, change orders, cost-to-complete reports, daily updates, and safety meetings that all had to be maintained in the windows that opened up in the nooks and crannies of the project schedule. 

In those days, the company I worked for was blessed with an abundance of work.  Very soon after my promotion to project manager I was given two and three projects at a time to manage.  The workload of managing the workflow and paperwork expected of me was immense, but I poured myself into it, and little by little, I figured out ways to streamline my processes - things that were difficult became easier, things that were slow, I learned to do fast, and I grew a little more efficient with each project I managed.  Still, I was about two years into my project management career before I realized I had not taken a vacation since I started running jobs, and that I had never cashed in on that promise of taking a day off when the schedule slowed and the jobs weren’t too needy. 

The jobs were always needy.  I worked 50-60 hours a week and every day I went home with the quiet knowledge that there was more than I could have gotten done that day if I had chosen to stick around for another hour or two.  I began to have trouble sleeping; I would lie awake and consider the mistakes I had made and how I might have avoided them.  I found myself working on Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, and my birthday (but honestly, what grown man actually takes his birthday off from work?).  Even on my insanely rare slow days, instead of real time off, I cleaned my truck and my desk, or organized and sharpened my tools; haunted by the fear that if I allowed myself to relax too much, I would make a mistake that would ruin a project. I did my best to protect my weekends, and I ran to the beach with my surfboard whenever I could to soak in the restorative power of the waves.  But on those weekends, if my phone ever rang, dread would sweep over me like an ice bucket down the back, knowing full well that it would be some emergency drawing me from my desperate attempt at respite and back into the grind.  Sunday afternoons were miserable affairs, as time marched relentlessly forward, dragging me unwillingly towards that 5AM Monday alarm.

My first breakthrough in time management was simply when I realized that there is always more to be done in the day than the day has time for.  This became even more simply profound when I started my own business.  There is always something broken that needs fixing, there is always a contract or an email I could be writing, or a process, a business practice, or material I could be researching.  Sometimes it works out and the clock strikes 4:30 just as I pack the last tool into my truck, having already built the cabinet and swept the shop.  Sometimes I stroll into the weekend with nothing but neat little bows on all of my projects, and a nice clean plan for Monday morning.  But this is the exception more than the rule, and often I have force myself to set down my work and settle for a level of completion that is less than satisfactory to my symmetry-loving-brain.  Sometimes I linger too long, get in trouble with my wife for leaving her at the mercy of the kids for an unacceptable amount of time, or make a mistake from fatigue because I’m stretching too hard for a clean stopping point.  Other times I quit too early and leave an ugly, unfinished mess for myself to clean up the next day.  I don’t always get it right, and the consequences of leaving unfinished work are very real, but I think I finally understand that convenient stopping points that perfectly align with my personal fatigue and family needs rarely (if ever) come, and the decision of when to put the tools down, call it a day, or take a vacation is ultimately up to only me if I am willing to take responsibility for the challenges that might come from the imperfect breaks that I carve out for myself.  Usually, these challenges are more manageable than the longer term, far more deleterious consequences of ceaselessly trying to appease the construction beast whose appetite will always exceed the very most that I am able to offer.

Pour Day

We were gearing up to pour concrete and my boss Dave was looking for an extra set of hands.  This was not the largest pour but at that time, I was a mid-level apprentice carpenter without a whole lot of experience with concrete.  Dave was quite experienced and was careful to explain to me that he wasn’t concerned about our ability to complete the concrete pour ourselves; he just wanted another set of hands just in case.  Concrete is tricky.  The mud, as we call it, has to be ordered and mixed with the correct amount of water and the proper mix of sand, aggregate, and lime for the application needed.  Even then, drive time from the plant, weather conditions, and complexity of the pour can all have major effects on how quickly that mud begins to harden.  There is also a very specific order and process to a pour; certain tools that are specific only to concrete finishing have to be used at specific times that are dictated by the indicators given off by the mud as it begins to cure.  Even in perfect conditions a concrete pour requires hard work and constant skilled attention.  In poor conditions, everything is sped up and made much more difficult as the finishing crew frantically works to avoid having their mistakes literally set in stone.  You get one chance, and once chance only to make it work.  If Dave said we could do it, I trusted him, but if he said he wanted another set of hands, preferably an experienced finisher, it certainly wasn’t going to offend me.

But as the day for the pour approached, Dave was having trouble finding a finisher to come help us.  The job was off the beaten path; 20 minutes into the foothills followed by another 15 minutes of dirt road and three creek crossings to get to the site and the pour was small.  The pros wanted real money because even that small of a pour would cost them a whole day as it could not be done in tandem with another small project.  In the end, Dave found himself just looking for an able-bodied set of hands to fetch things, pick things up, and clean things as we needed; it would be up to us to do the finishing.  But even unskilled laborers were hard to find, and as that pour day came relentlessly nearer, Dave still had no helper for us.  Finally, now somewhat nervous myself about our prospects for the pour (accentuated by the constant worrying from Dave about all the difficulties he was having finding labor), with only two days to go, I suggested maybe my 12 year old little brother Pat might be able to help us out.  At 12, Pat was still more skinny little boy than strong young man, but he was smart, he listened well, and was not afraid of hard work.  Most importantly, he was available.  Dave’s options were exhausted, so Pat was hired to be our third set of hands.

We arrived early on pour day to give ourselves plenty of time to set up.  The mud wasn’t coming till 8AM, but we needed to clear a few debris piles to ease our movement around the work areas, and Dave wanted to train Pat on the names of the tools we would be needing and give him a brief rundown on the process of the pour.  The day was beautiful.  The weather was cool but clear, and as the sun crested the canyon wall to the East, casting rays through the oak tress and revealing the dew left on every leaf and blade of grass with glittering golden reflections, we were reminded how absolutely beautiful those backwoods properties can be in the early spring.  We were ahead of schedule and in high spirits as we set up our finishing tools and began clearing the debris piles to give plenty of elbow room for the work to come. 

Dave brought over a wheelbarrow, and he and I reached down to team lift an old water heater into it and clear it out of the way.  That water heater had been running on back country well water for the ten years prior to our removing it the week before, and had built up a large, heavy mass of minerals and sediment in the bottom of the tank which made it somewhat awkward to lift.  But I was young and strong, so I took the heavy bottom end and we muscled it up and over to the wheelbarrow.  But as we were squaring ourselves to set it down evenly, the sediment sloshed and shifted, changing the center of gravity on the tank causing it to want to roll.  The sudden shifting weight and rolling motion caused both of us to lose our grip, and the water heater went crashing into the wheelbarrow.  Somehow, my ungloved thumb got smashed violently between bottom of the tank, bearing the full weight of its load of sediments, and the unyielding metal wall of the commercial grade wheelbarrow.

I felt the impact like a hammer blow, and Dave immediately dashed over to my end of the wheelbarrow and helped me free my mangled thumb, apologizing and swearing the whole time.  I wasn’t in a ton of pain, but looked down to find the sharp, angle metal foot of the water heater had bisected my thumbnail with a deep, ragged cut that was just beginning to seep dark arterial blood.  The top half of the nail was gone; completely sheared off leaving the glistening pinkish red of the raw nailbed.  The bottom half of the nail was pointed in a wonky angle, only attached to my thumb by the tiniest thread of skin at the cuticle.  “Oh no, oh no!”  Dave was clearly distressed on my behalf.  Indeed, the wound looked terrible and incredibly painful, but by some strange blessing, a few months prior to this accident, I had suffered a deep cut at the base of my thumb that had severed or damaged the nerves that fed the back of my thumb, and they were still in the long slow process of repairing themselves.  I felt a little bit of pain from the deep parts of the cut, but what should have been the really painful stuff – the raw and exposed nailbed had absolutely no feeling. Instead, I was fascinated with an almost third-party interest, and had to resist the urge to poke at the wound to see what I could feel and what I couldn’t. 

But after a moment of gawking, practical matters set in.  This was a pretty serious injury, and needed attention from a medical professional.  So Dave and I hastily improvised a temporary bandage and Dave recruited the owner of the property to give me a ride into town and drop me off at the ER.  As I fumbled clumsily with my seatbelt, trying not to bang around my bandaged thumb, I heard the property owner sigh.  I looked up just in time to see, as we pulled out of their long driveway and onto the dirt road, the concrete truck pass us on its way up the driveway to go deliver the mud to Dave and his new finisher, the 12 year old Pat. 

Several hours and six stitches later (three of them right through that raw nail bed), the owner and I pulled back up to the house to find a very tired Dave and Pat rinsing shovels and wheelbarrows.  I was afraid of what I would find; after all, Dave had been worrying for weeks about needing an extra set of skilled hands.   Then, moments before the show started, he found himself solo with several yards of concrete and a 12 year old helper who had never touched we concrete in his life.  Yet to my surprise, (after he confirmed my thumb was going to be fine with no real permanent damage) Dave relayed to me, in the sort of relaxed elation of one who has just achieved a significant feat, that the pour simply could not have gone smoother.  The mud was the perfect consistency, and the weather was perfect.  Pat had been alert, quick to learn, and not afraid to jump in and do whatever Dave asked of him.  They had worked non-stop with no breaks for breakfast or lunch, but they were able to get it all done, and done well.  Dave had great things to say about Pat’s effort and attitude and backed those words up with a man’s wages for his hard day of work.  And while I have no doubts that Pat performed admirably, the glory of this success belonged to primarily to Dave.  His skill had been pretty severely tested, and deserved every bit of his endorphin induced elation.  After some dishing out some good natured ribbing over how I was even willing to mutilate my hand in order to avoid a concrete pour, he took us all out to an early dinner.

Tired

I remember being tired in college.  I was a rower, so my teammates and I were up every day before dawn, running stairs and lifting weights at the gym, cranking away on the ergometers, or launching the boats on the bay.  After two hours of hard AM practice followed by a huge breakfast, a warm classroom with a droning professor was a powerful soporific.  I remember startling awake partway through class and looking down to see the letters on my notepad had grown sloppy and gradually trailed into a long streak where I had fallen asleep in the very act of taking notes.

I remember being tired in my early days as a project manager.  I was thrown into the hotseat when it came to construction management, and for the first time I suffered insomnia, as I lay awake thinking about the tasks of the day ahead.  “The world belongs to tired people,” was some encouragement from my pastor that I took comfort in.  There was a reason for my fatigue; I was pursuing something difficult, and it required immense amounts of time and energy from me.

I remember being tired when I was dating my wife.  We dated long distance for a year and when she was home from nursing school for spring break, I only had a week to spend with her in person before she left town and went back to her studies.  We were out every night until 1 or 2AM, then I was back up at 5, so I could get to work for a ten-hour workday.  After a week of this, I was a mess.

I remember being tired when my kids were born.  This was a new kind of tired.  In the old days, no matter how tired I was, If I roused myself for a workout or a quick three-mile run, I could shake the sleepies and find the energy to roll on ahead.  Now, after short intervals of sleep at night punctuated by the crying infant, followed by full workdays, for months on end, my old standby of working out to revive myself no longer worked.  I remember the dismay of finding that after a rough night’s sleep and a full day’s work, not only did that three-mile run feel terrible on my body, but I finished it feeling even more exhausted than when I had started.  I felt like every other tired I’d ever felt was simply amateur.  This was real fatigue.

This has been a hard couple of years.  In and through the COVID 19 pandemic and all the surrounding and ongoing effects, my family, my church, my circle of friends, and my business have all suffered loss and failure.  Parts of my community have broken and scattered, tools and resources I’ve counted on for years no longer exist, and the landscape of business is changing at a dizzying pace. The pre-pandemic systems just don’t work quite the way they used to, and I can’t help but feel we have stepped into a new era of life; forever changed from what it used to be.  There is a mourning in the fatigue I feel these days.  It’s a different kind of tired; a deep tiredness of the soul; continually and brutally reminded that we operate in a fallen world.

Yet, despite that fatigue, I keep finding the hope to rise again and start another day, another project, and another adventure.  Just as the fatigue has reached new levels in the last couple years, there is a maturity in hope these days that’s different and new to me.  Hope is no longer a fleeting and fickle daydream, but rather a steady, tempered resolve for a better future; born from fire and fatigue.  A resolve to step out and take risks again, even where I have suffered loss.  A resolve to see the best in the people around me.  A resolve to anchor down In the simple virtues of kindness and humility, and a resolve to quietly and in my own way, bring a vision of life and hope in every part of my life.  I am still wonderfully blessed and surrounded by fantastic people.  It’s my joy to reveal the beauty of those around me, the beauty of the place I call home, and the immense hope that I have for my family, my business, my state, and my country.

Boss Phenomenon

It was hot.  The shrubbery that surrounded the stupid electric timer I was supposed to be programming was so thick, I had to force my body through the only jagged gap in the bushes right next to the garden wall.   The hole was so small it compressed my chest so I could only take shallow breaths against the poking foliage, and twisted my body so as to limit me to the use of one hand at a time.  If I rotated my torso sideways, I could gain the use of my other hand by extending both arms over my head, forcing my shoulders up against my ears. In this awkward horizontal shrug I could barely get my head back enough to read the tiny, now sideways, LCD screen through the thicket of branches and arms.   What should have been a simple project had become a drawn-out battle approaching the multiple hour mark, but I had just about got it.  I backed out of my contorted position, stood up and stretched my aching body, took a few breaths, and then dove back into the shrubbery to finish the programming.   Worming my way back into the fully horizontal position with both arms extended far over my head, I started tapping out the programming sequence on the sweat-dampened rubber buttons of the timer.  I’d had to memorize the manual of the unit; there was no way I could read a cryptic set of instructions written in tiny print, and probably poorly translated from a foreign language, while wedged in that impossible position.  A bead of perspiration trickled down the tip of my nose and hung for a second before my gasping and grunting sent it falling to the earth as I fought through the aching fatigue creeping over my shoulders and out my arms.  DONE! I hit the final key only to find that in my strained state, I had been punching buttons so aggressively that I had somehow knocked the power supply loose and needed to do it all over again.

Swearing violently in my head as I extirpated my body once again from the snag, I found my boss standing over me.

“What are you doing?” he asked

“Programming this stupid timer, just like you asked me to!” I exploded.

“You’ve been working on that this whole time?  That should have been a five minute job!”

I was immediately defensive in the face of his irritation with me.  “It would be a five minute job if the damn thing wasn’t wedged into the tightest corner of this stupid project!”

He eyed me slowly and skeptically, with almost a confused look on his face.  Then he stooped over and gently slid his torso into the jagged hole I had called my home for the last couple hours and reached up to the timer.  He grunted as he twisted his head to see the unit and extended his arm through the thicket to reach the timer.  I felt a rush of validation watching him struggle to reach the goal.  But that validation quickly turned to wonder, then dismay, as his hand reached past the buttons, grasped the whole unit firmly, and removed it from the wall with one sharp, precisely angled tug.  A moment later, he had disentangled himself from the web and was standing comfortably next to me with the timer in his hand. 

“If you put a battery in the backup, you can program it here and then re-mount it, now let’s see…”  With infuriating ease, he pulled out the small flashlight he always carried in his back pocket and removed the batteries.

“Perfect.”  By some miracle of providence, likely reserved for those who hold positions of authority, the two triple-A batteries from his flashlight were exactly what the timer needed.  He popped them in, and with some begrudging input from me, tapped out the programming sequence (because of course I had it memorized), then unhurriedly slid himself back into the thicket, and clicked the timer into place.  The whole operation took less than three minutes and hot though it was, he was far from perspiring and showed not even the lightest signs of effort.

I call this the “Boss Phenomenon” and believe it to be a fact of human life, in the vein of the Pareto Principle or Murphy’s Law.  If you have spent any time doing any kind of work; mechanics, construction, puzzle-making, you name it; you will have encountered a time where you were stuck on a task, completely befuddled and unable to complete it.  Then, at the peak of your exasperation, your boss will show up and neatly solve your problem in under ten seconds.  It is absolutely infuriating, humiliating, and awe inspiring.  It has happened to me more times than I can count in every job I’ve ever had. 

Sometimes it’s a matter of experience: this adventure in the shrubbery was my first time programming a digital timer and my complete unfamiliarity with the product and the context made me vulnerable to making a rookie mistake.  Other times, it’s a matter of skill: I once spent a large amount of time attempting to fit a difficult mortise-and-tenon joint. After giving me plenty of time to try my hand at the craft, my boss took the tools from my hand, and in two deft movements with the hammer and chisel, he cleanly and sharply removed the offending material and slid the joint firmly into place.  It was the same result I might have eventually reached, but it would take me another 15 years with those tools before I could do what he did in the time that he did it.

Sometimes it’s a matter of fortuitous timing; I’ve spent half a day digging to find a gas line, only to have the boss come up, listen to me express my frustration in not having found it yet, then silently take the shovel from my hand, gently scrape the side of the trench, and expose the line with one stroke.  If I had simply kept my mouth shut and taken that next stroke myself, I’d have saved myself the indignity.

Still other times, it’s just dumb luck.  I’ve struggled for far too long trying to start a small engine (as on a blower, a generator, or a trencher), fixing pull cords and flywheels, no doubt flooding the carburetor on occasion. After the boss has watched my hot, sweating, frustration for what feels to be an indecent amount of time, he will take the tool from my hand and inevitably start it on the first pull.

The Boss Phenomenon has been a source of frustration for much of my working career; yet from the moment I hired my first helper, I’ve noticed that the shoe is now on the other foot.  It may well be the absolute best part of my job when I get to a site and find one of my guys who is obviously frustrated, overwhelmed, and has spent way too much time one a task that he knows I expected him to have completed long ago; his frustration now compounded exponentially by my very presence - the physical embodiment of his failure and shame; only to have me walk up and solve his issue in the amount of time it takes to sneeze. 

I usually try to ease the feeling of shame and frustration my employees are undoubtably experiencing in that moment.  They are seated in a chair that I occupied not so long ago, and I expect they relish the interaction about as little as I did when was in their place.  I honor their unsuccessful efforts and attempt to bring dignity to their work as best I can, and I consider it a sign of their good will that the Boss Phenomenon has now become something like a running joke amongst the team.

But every now and then, my moral maturity fails me, and it is just too much fun to approach one of my guys who has been struggling, twisted over a countertop, upside down and backwards, trying to pop a lens onto the face of one of our fancy, dotless LED under-cabinet lighting strips.  It’s always hot out; I can see the frustration rising like heat waves off his face, and the sweat on every pore of his skin cheerfully reflecting the light from the obnoxiously complicated lighting strips (that look so good on a finished kitchen!).  Then, when he explodes out of his cramped position to recover so he can try again, I’ll swoop in without a word, and in one motion, pop that lens into place, then give him my sweetest smile, and walk away.  If I had a mic, I’d drop it.