I have been struggling to find work for quite some time. At one point, things got so bad that I spent a brief period detailing boats. The job was one which literally anyone could do, but was physically exhausting and required frequent toe stubs and taking directions about how to apply wax from a chain-smoking non high school graduate.

I worked at a ship yard  30 miles North of Boston for a guy named Craig, who told me the first day I met him that he was “the king of the dipshits” and owned an independent service department that operated within the marina grounds.  Craig was your typical operator – the type of guy who didn’t go to college and wants everyone to know it.  I found him moderately likable but hated many things about him, mainly that he spoke ill of whichever worker was not in his sight and I knew that the minute I drove away he was mocking me, possibly about having gone to college.

Craig spoke often of his chops as a “master mechanic” but in the month or so I spent busting my back for him, his job consisted mostly of driving back and forth to the Home Depot and telling me how much money he made.

Craig’s business model was pretty smart.  Though I was never formally versed on its specifics, it appeared that boat owners paid for work and detailing by qualified and fully insured workers which was handed to a cadre of under-the -table drifters who no insurance company had ever heard of.  As long as nobody ever gets hurt, breaks a boat, or tries to buy a four wheeler by listing Craig as the employer, this business should be sustainable.

The foreman was a guy named Nate who was constantly taking days off to free up time for fighting with his live-in girlfriend who was running around on him, and whose eight cats were turning out to be a real downer. When he was on the job, he mostly walked around carrying extension cords and making things a bigger deal than they were.

One of my favorite colleagues was a guy named Bob who was 48 years old but because of a strange condition known as smoking 35,000 cigarettes, looked no younger than 60 and was the kind of guy who refers to a car as being "fully loaded" if it has electric windows.  Bob had been laid off from a machine shop and was using this job to bide time while waiting for his wife to get off of work at White Hen.  Bob believed he was worth top dollar on the open market and spent most of his time explaining that he had a music selection that would surprise me, and telling me the exact story of how he came to acquire every valuable possession in his life, including a motorcycle which he sold for a $300 profit after four years of ownership, and two corgis, which were the inspiration for the vanity plate, “Korgis.” 

If I ignored his frequent racist comments and laziness, I could tolerate working with Bob, mostly because he carried a photo album containing pictures of his freshly waxed vehicles, and because he hated Craig, and spent much of his time explaining to me how lucky Craig was to have someone of his skill working for so little money.  The true beauty of Bob was that in between delusional nonsense about his mastery of manual labor and telling me to slow down because the job “wasn’t a marathon”, he would correctly use words such as “spartan”.

On the day I determined I wouldn’t be coming back I intentionally did not tell Craig and ignored about 50 phone calls from him over the following days.  It’s not in my nature to screw over a boss, or leave someone hanging, but Craig was a special breed of prick who thinks he is smarter than the guys who do all of his work.  A few days before I left he told me that Nate was leaving to pursue fighting with his girlfriend full time and that he’d like me to take control as soon as possible.  I agreed I’d do it and waited patiently for a subsequent discussion, or at least a raise in pay. When nothing happened, I spoke to Bob and determined that Craig had told him the same thing, with nearly the exact wording.

I came to the job with a good attitude and strong back and hadn’t taken so much as a five minute break since starting.  I was offended that he thought lying about paying me more money was the best way to fool me into staying around for a few weeks until his season ended when I had no intention of leaving. Though I never trusted him, I will admit to being hurt by his slight - but I guess I was foolish to expect more from the King of Dipshits.