I don’t know if I have ever put the story of The Caribbean Sawhorses down so I will do so now.
It is about pay-back, retribution, the desire to “get even”. I have many reasons for wishing the accounting of my life could be balanced like a check book but it is not ever going to happen. Some people get even with everyone. Some get no satisfaction at all. Most everyone gets an occasional victory over injustice. This was mine.
I was working on a bank building. I don’t remember who I was working for or with or the dates of this particular project. (Except that Matt had just been born-I manage to date my working life by recalling whether or not one or the other of my sons had been born/ went to college…etc!) Elisabeth and I were living in a two bedroom, rental garden apartment on Caribbean Drive (S.W. 200th street) just off of South Dixie Highway. We had a small balcony overlooking the pool. We were on the third floor. It cost us about $168 dollars a month and compared to our Spartan existence up in the Catskill Mountains it was heaven! Waving palms in the sun, swimming at the pool, air conditioning. I was in the union (another whole story) making $10.10 an hour and I was comfortable and happy with the money. I had my 600 hours in and my benefits in force, my first son born and the hospital bill paid. My work for this particular contractor was usually pretty close to home and in this case the job was right across the highway from our apartment. It only took me a minute to drive my truck along Southwest 200th street a couple of blocks, across Dixie Highway, make a right and I was at work! I was living the dream.
This one day I was charged by my foreman to make a pair of saw horses for use by the carpenters crew. I did it quickly and took my lunch break. When I came back from lunch the saw horses had been appropriated by an electrician who was in the process of assembling some lighting fixtures. He had the horses laden with 2 x 4 florescent light bodies which he was wiring and preparing to hang on the suspended ceiling. They were not his to use, he just saw the opportunity to take them while I was at lunch. When I told him that I needed them back he copped an attitude and told me to go fuck myself! He and a couple of his red-neck buddies had a good laugh over it. I don’t remember my foreman getting too bent outta shape over the discourtesy but I was pretty pissed off. I had to build another set of horses for the carpenters crew and it was that additional expenditure of my time and the materials that made my foreman mad. I swore to myself I would make the electrician pay for the slight…I spent the afternoon stewing over it and planning my revenge.
In any commercial, concrete block structure the wiring for all the power, light and equipment control is run through gray plastic conduit that is run like hollow spaghetti up the walls, over the ceilings, and under the slab that forms the floor…in short, all over the building. It all comes together at the electrical panels where the gray conduits meet and all the wire is eventually pulled and terminated. In order to get all the wires to the panels the conduits have “drags” inside, which are strings used to pull the ropes that pull the wires through the gray tubing. Most of an electrician’s rough-in job is installing the tubing and drags and then the wire. The finish work is the termination of the wires at the many outlets and light fixtures (etc) and terminating the wire at the panels. In this bank the conduit was all in place. The drags were mostly in place, but the wire had yet to be “pulled”.
After I had gone home for the day, eaten my supper and it was beginning to get dark I got on my bike and peddled the short distance to the job site. The empty concrete and block building was quiet as I pulled my bike into the empty building. A single stringer of bulbs-the temporary light-was illuminated so I could easily see my way around. I was familiar enough that I didn’t need the light. I went straight to the electrical closet where all the metal panel back-boxes were fastened to the walls. Below the back-boxes the gray conduit was stubbed up through the concrete slab floor. Dozens of one and two inch conduits ready to be brought into the back-boxes. These were the paths for the wires to be pulled for the power outlets, the telephone outlets, the disconnects for the A/C equipment, in short, the whole electrical system. Some of them had the jet-line string hanging out of them. Some had none because later a “mouse”-a small furry ball attached to a jet-line would be blown through the tube using a powerful shop-vac vacuum cleaner and a rope would be attached to actually pull the wire.
I found the bag of cement that I had stashed earlier in the work day. It would have been better if it had been grout but cement would do… I poured some of the Portland cement into a five gallon bucket. Using water from the yellow and red drinking barrel and a piece of reinforcing bar I mixed the cement into a very thick soup. I added some sand until the mix had a consistency like chili con carne and then I carefully poured a quart or so into each and every conduit coming out of the slab. When I ran low on the mix I made some more until there was not one un-constipated conduit in that electrical closet. I threw the bucket into the dumpster and carefully wiped the drips off of the stubbed up conduits. When I was done it looked like I had never been there-everything looked clean and neat. Then I rode my bicycle home.
The next day the electricians continued using my saw horses. I made another pair. They seemed to get quite a bit of satisfaction as they continued ragging on me. I am sure they would have killed me if they’d known why I had a shit-eating grin on my face and refused to let them get under my skin. At the end of the week the rough carpentry was completed and I got transferred to another job out at a Florida Power and Light station on Rickenbacker Causeway. I wished I could have been there when they started trying to pull their wire through the rock-hard blockages in every conduit. Probably lucky that I wasn’t. Would have ended up in jail or, worse, beaten to a pulp. I am sure my little hour in the dark cost their company at least ten grand. Maybe more. I’m sure those turned out to be the most expensive pair of saw horses in history.
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