A long time ago I did office work for a heavy equipment operator.  And gawd what an operator.  I was all of 18 and he was every bit of 40 not to mention married but that didn’t stop him from chasing me around the desk, talking disgusting trash, brushing against me to “explain something”, and other unwelcome advances.  If it was now he would have gotten a single word of warning before a set of car keys stabbed through the nuts but back then I was a scared little rabbit who thought she needed the job more than the hassle.  He was plenty horrible in other ways as well.  I’d hear him on the phone yukking it up with his buddies talking about how much drunken fun he had had the night before or lying to potential customers about what his dangerously decrepit equipment could do or saying stuff like “I’ll get ‘my girl’ to send you that info” etc etc.  He was famous for showing up on a new job for 5 seconds before disappearing for weeks on end, making me the one having to feed a line of bullshit to the never-ending string of screaming customers.  He only let me pay his bills pennies on the dollar but nobody could owe him money for 5 minutes oh no.  So answering the phone was real fun but not as much as driving over to somebody else’s office to beg for money on the doorstep before their bill even came in the mail.  When he wasn’t ducking his pissed-off wife, he was hiding from state license issuers, safety inspectors, tax collectors, auditors, insurance agents, the list was endless.  Finally I had enough when he told me he was letting the cleaning lady go so that my job duties could from now on include scrubbing the toilets for my $3.50 an hour or whatever.  It was the only job where I walked out with no notice whatsoever.  The kicker?  My own mother had gotten me this job cause she had worked for him, and knew he “had an opening” after she quit.   While he probably didn’t hit on her (that I know of) she certainly knew about the other parts of it.    

There’s a P.S.:   A couple years after I had escaped his clutches, he caught a 16 year old kid trying to steal an old crappy C.B. radio out of the cab of one of his shitty rigs.  It was at night but he was sleeping at his business cause his wife had finally given him the boot.  At gunpoint he made the kid climb down from the truck, put up his hands, kneel down, and then shot him execution style in the back of the head.  BANG, no more stealing from him!  The kid’s friend/accomplice who was also there testified that the kid was begging for his life before the trigger was pulled.  And he was acquitted for it cause of “owner’s property rights” in the blood-red state of ole Virginny.   Thanks Mom appreciate it, I am certainly a wiser, richer person for knowing this scum of the earth. 

-slavin