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Making
things happen - with integrity. A Weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, February 7, 2000 Volume II Number 6
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FOCUS - Home Improvement
This week we put down ten yards of concrete. Ten yards. We’ve got sidewalks. And sore lower backs.
This is serious manual labor.
Bending
over, shovel in hand, pushing around gravel and concrete, pounding stakes,
setting then busting up forms, pulling the skreet board, the sound of wet
cement whooshing over the interior surface of a massive drum turning under the
diesel power of a heavy Mack truck, pushing the chute back and forth in careful
rhythms, spreading the “mud” around evenly, toweling and edging… it
brought back a flood of memories of the work crew the summer I got married.
I was twenty-one. Fresh out of Bible School. I needed to accumulate some money – fast. There were two job offers. I had a choice. I could either drive a Frito-Lay delivery truck or become a common laborer on a flat concrete crew (flat as opposed to upright – that is, slabs and sidewalks and floors versus walls and footings and foundations). Concrete paid two bucks an hour more than Fritos. It was a no brainer.
Hand me the shovel and the rubber boots. Good-bye Frito-Lay.
The crew was a rough bunch. They didn’t have a whole lot in common with my Bible school classmates. When I showed up in sneakers my first day, Crankshaft decided to work me over. I didn’t understand it at the time, but later I watched the gang test new laborers. About half the new guys quit within two or three days - too much back breaking work, too many profane low-lifers and not enough emotional support.
We called the foreman “Crankshaft” because every day his tee shirt was the same. Apparently he got his hands on a whole box of ‘em in some former life - white tee shirts with a full color picture of a gleaming turned crankshaft from a 454 GM hot-rod engine. The words printed across his muscled chest – “Quality Crankshaft” – gave him his name. But when he was close enough to hear us, we called him Jim.
I had to prove myself if I was going to survive the summer. Crankshaft told me we were the best crew in the business. When the boss needed it done right and done fast, he put our crew on the site. We don’t have time for slackers, he explained. When crankshaft said, see that pile of gravel? Take the shovel and the wheelbarrow and move it over there. He pointed. I moved it. Those first couple days I suffered other abuses – name calling, walkin’ me through mud puddles in my tennis shoes, personal humiliations relating to my marriage plans, things like that. But I needed that money.
After quitting time that first day, I bought some real work boots. With steel toes.
I picked up the shovel, put my head down, got down to business, and pretty soon got myself accepted as a member of the crew.
We were good. And I bagged four dollars twenty five cents an hour. Big bucks in 1969.
* * * * * * * *
Timothy Allen Dick was born to Gerald and Martha Dick in Denver Colorado on June 13, 1953. Maybe it was his last name. The only real defense for a junior high kid with that heavy a handle is comedy.
It worked for Tim Allen.
At age ten, his dad was killed in an auto accident. Soon after, his mother re-married. Tim’s step-dad was his mother’s high school sweetheart who, in a tragic coincidence, lost his young wife to a car crash.
Tim managed to complete a college education – his major at Western Michigan University was Television Production. But he fell into friendship with a fast lane crowd who taught him the fine art of drug ingestion. Then when he graduated to dealing those drugs, an arrest landed him a two-year sentence in a federal prison.
Friends, family and his college sweetheart say that Tim was devastated. But at this critical juncture, he took responsibility, acknowledging that there was no one else to blame. He took his punishment, made his public and private apologies and did his time.
While in prison, Tim wrote letters and read books. He had no idea that he would someday be star of a number one television sit-com, headliner at the box-office and author of best-selling books.
He developed a comedy routine that would become his trademark. In spite of its political incorrectness, Tim’s act focused on the idiosyncrasies of manhood. Some considered it an unwelcome return to a Neanderthal view of the historic tension between males and females. This was before John Gray built a cottage industry around the wildly successful psychological metaphor: men from Mars – women from Venus.
Men, according to Tim Allen, are pigs. They live in a world of tools, and rules, and grunts, and a fascination with raw power and how things work.
Why do men love to watch the game on the weekend? It’s not just the bone crushing and the head banging and the competition and the score. Not only the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
It’s because the game is a game of rules. You know where you stand. When the guy steps out of bounds, the whistle blows, the flag is thrown, the coach yells, the guys throw up their heads and their hands in disgust and you know the play’s over. You know where the ball will be placed. The only debate is “did he REALLY step out of bounds?” And of course, the replay in slo-mo confirms it. The call is correct. Guys don’t debate whether or not “out of bounds” ought to be a violation. It is. Them’s the rules.
Women, according to Allen, find the whole thing an over-simplification. Life is more complicated than a football game. Stepping out of bounds isn’t the issue. It’s about relationships. Fairness. Feelings. Causes. Talking it through. Letting go. Nursing the wounds.
Guys don’t have time for that stuff.
The flag’s down. It’s settled. Call
the huddle. Let’s get goin’.
Gotta move on. We’re still in the game.
Disney made prime-time situation comedy out of Tim Allen’s original comedy routine. Home Improvement. For nine years, Tim and his TV wife Jill fenced and dueled their way into television history. Their three boys grew up before our eyes while Al (Borland – i.e. bore-land, get it?) bored us and Wilson taught us and Lisa made our hearts skip a beat.
But Tim’s right – there is security in knowing the rules. And playin’ by them.
* * * * * * * *
When the heavy concrete truck pulled up the hill, we could hear the diesel laboring. Right on time – 6:30AM. We were ready. Just behind that massive truck was the pump – a straight six cylinder engine mounted on a trailer pulled behind an aging pick-up with a long hose looped around a hook. The pump-man had his teenage son sitting beside him in the cab. “It’s time he learned how to run the pump,” he told us.
There’s a ritual on the job site. It’s universal. This ritual is observed on every job site in the world, before work begins. Only takes a couple minutes: identify the players. Everyone agrees. Who’s boss? Who’s payin’ the freight? Who decides on the degree of wetness in the concrete? Who calls for cement?
Once the roles are clear - the driver, the chute man, the foreman, the laborer(s), the pump-man and his assistant, the lever-puller at the chute, the shovel man – then the work starts.
If the foreman needs a tool, the laborer gets it. More hose from the pump? The puller pulls. Rebar gets tossed in as the concrete fills the forms. Start – stop. Start – stop. The diesel roars. Then slows to a purr. The concrete flows, then is cut off. It’s a dance, a concrete ballet.
Pure choreography.
* * * * * * * *
Getting things done is not as complicated as you think.
It doesn’t really matter where you are this morning – a professional office (law, accounting, medicine, financial services, investment advisor, insurance broker), a hospital, a university, a manufacturing plant, law enforcement, a graduate school, a church, a non-profit, a school, a high-rise corporate office, a government agency, an executive suite, or perhaps you are running a thriving, profitable business out of the fourth bedroom – today you want to get things done.
The rules are clear. Don’t complicate it. Tim Allen is right. Do the ritual. Then do the dance.
Don’t take the “Crankshaft” in your world too seriously. He’s/she’s just a bit player.
Don the uniform. Identify the cast and crew. Who’s the boss? Who pays the freight? Who’s the decision maker? Where are the tools? Power ‘em up. Call the huddle. Point ‘em all in the direction of the goal line. High five each other. Get to your position. Call out “Ready!”
It’s Monday morning.
Here comes the concrete. Right down the chute.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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