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The foreman up at the building site informed Gary, last-minute, that he needed the jacks and canteen cleaned. Gary said the fellow had told him "don't leave town without doing it."
That irked me, and I had to impress upon Gary — I had to press my point — that that guy is a prick. Gary was blithe about it, and this pissed me off. I didn't want to get angry, but I felt it happening.
And Gary, so blithe. "Sure, the foremen are all pricks." Yes, but he's not your foreman. I know, but....
And maybe it's something to do with coming up on my 44th birthday, I don't feel right about cleaning shit out of a toilet bowl. It's not because I'm American, that's for sure — and Moe's suggestion that it was is a window into the group-think that is at the real bedrock of the problems that I'm having working with Gary.
I walked off the job. I don't know why I did that, nor why I'd yelled so vociferously at Gary when he was — again, blithely — telling me we just had to clean out the toilets for these pricks and was nothing we could ever do or say about it.
But I walked off, and walked home. Gary came over later to see me — I'd turned my phone off.
I could only apologize, without explanation.
But he said one thing that rings in my head. People don't understand why I let you work with me.
Brings two questions: Why would he let anybody talk that way? [And] why would he tell me that? He knows why he works with me (beside the fact that we are employed by the same company, not me by him.) He brings me along because I do good work, and because he enjoys my company, most of the time.
Naturally, I have to wonder who is "they." Moe and Gicu are the only ones who've been along on any of our jobs — and look at them. Talk about letting a fellow down. I've never done what they've done, sleeping through the shift or being too drunk for work.
True, there was that evening that I couldn't make it up to St. -*-'s, during the phase where I was falling cripple to panic attacks, and in the case of that evening took a bit of drink and — Gicu style — couldn't make it. Unlike Gicu, I was apologetic.
So those two, in short, have nothing constructive to say.
Who else is "they?" Flanders? Prick. He wouldn't say a good word about me, nor a slander to my face. F*ck him.
Krusty? God only knows. It's getting to the point where I don't care anymore. The mere connection of Gary to the old social group — the mere fact that I've considered him a friend — this is in fact the greatest impediment to any solution. It hurts, in an irritating, dirty-finger-on-my-open-heart kind of way.
People wonder. And him trying to tell me that the old group is irrelevant. It's not irrelevant, and its effects are malevolent.
— Kilkenny Ireland, early 2008
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