I want to be a supervisor

So I work in a brand-new office building. It is not state-of-the-art or anything, and there isn't an awesome fountain in the middle or security you have to show a badge to for entrance, but it's new. And it is an office building. And they are still constructing it. That's how new it is.

As I got the muse to write this blog, two friendly, talkative contractor-chums were placing glass in the door and window frames of the individual offices/cubes. They are about as stereotypical you can get when it comes to Midwestern contractors: dirty clothes; dirty facial hair; and dirty vocabularies. In a nutshell, I feel home at last.

And- as far as I can tell- they are doing a bang-up job. There are five offices to get to up here, and- as of when I decided to write this- they had finished three. Because I am the only one up here today, they were kind enough to not do mine until the very end, so I could get some important work done in the process. Right as they started mine- a process they said would only take 15 minutes tops- a third man showed up.

Their supervisor.

What a bastard.

According to the supervisor, everything that was done was incorrect. The type of glue and tape used to hold the windows in place. The amount of dirt and fingerprints on the glass. The process in which glass is mass-produced in the United States. The pronuniciation of the word "glass." The entire concept of opaque surfaces. Wrong. All wrong.

The best argument came in regards to a process the supervisor wanted to streamline to knock about 12 seconds off of each door. (Remember, there are now only two doors left. The amount of time saved? Less than your standard Kit Kat commercial on TV. Give me a break!) The supervisor suggested they could save time (ie. 12 sec.) putting the glass on the door WITHOUT removing the door handle first. Hank, the lovable, 50-something contractor who has been working on the project for most of the last six weeks, explained that they had narrowly averted catastrophe on the first door earlier in the work day when the glass nearly hit the door handle, which would have shattered the pane and just been a big ol' mess.

Hank was wrong. Stupid Hank.

Time was more important then the possibility of shattering a 3 foot by 6 foot pane of glass. I mean, sure it would be a huge mess, would push the project back at minimum one whole day because of cleaning and procurement of another pane of glass that big, and- hell- could even be life-threatening if a shard of glass managed to sever an artery. But still: why be done in three hours when you could be done in two hours, 59 minutes, and 48 seconds?

This time the supervisor was wrong. And how ironic, he was proven wrong while he attempted to prove ol' Hank wrong.

Up went the pane of glass in the supervisor's hand, down it went across the door handle, and everywhere went the glass, in pieces ranging in size from a penny to a million times smaller than a penny.

So the supervisor was wrong, and Hank won, right? Nope. Hank was put in charge of cleaning the shards, locating another pane of glass, picking it up, and finishing the job, all in the next three hours. (Sorry; two hours 59 minutes and now 40 seconds.) And the supervisor left. For the day. For the weekend. Also, I have to go potty, but because of the amount of broken glass on the floor in front of the door, I am stuck. I'm thinking of emptying out my empty Mountain Dew bottle and "refilling" it.

God, I wish I was a supervisor.

Always watching,

Adam "The 'House" Woolhouse