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This is no shit. The job I had before I started driving a truck? Our production manager threatened to kill at least one person every week. Most people joke around saying "oh, I'm gonna kill that guy." With this man it was no joke. He lived in a camper he had parked on the shop floor. In the camper were at least three guns, and he carried a loaded derringer everywhere he went. Everyone in the building was afraid of him, including the company president, but no one would do anything because he's got a hair-trigger temper. (I downloaded a page listing some of the warning signs of psychopathy. The page had fourteen symptoms and I could prove 11.) And when he wasn't threatening to kill someone, he was screaming his damn fool head off. He'd scream every time something didn't go exactly the way he thought it was supposed to. The problem is, the man had never worked in this field before so he didn't actually know how things were supposed to go. He was a steamfitter for thirty years. There's one right way to fit pipes. In graphics there might be forty different correct ways to do something; if he didn't like the way you chose, he'd go off on you. He used to scream bloody murder at the laminator operators because they didn't laminate like he did. Their work was perfectly fine, but it wasn't the way he would do it so it was all wrong.
We used this matte lamination stock. It's supposed to be completely shine-free. The manufacturer changed the way they made it, and it was a touch glossier than he liked. His solution? Yell at me for labeling gloss lam as flat lam.
We wrapped a box truck. We sent two guys up to measure the box truck. They wrote down the wrong height for the sides. The truck came in after the panels were printed, and they were too short. His solution? Yell at me. (And no, he didn't apologize when it turned out I wasn't the one who screwed up.)
He came in one day and demanded that I immediately print, on this one printer, some little labels because we needed to ship them right out. I did so. Well, this worthless piece of shit walked into the room, saw the labels printing, and started screaming bloody murder. Said I shouldn't have put the labels into the workflow (I was printing six big squares of camouflage) at that time, even though he said to. Said if the next piece of camouflage was a different color than the first ones he was going to write a note backwards and nail it to my forehead with a nail gun so I'd always see it when I looked in the mirror.
He threatened to fire me because I "let us run out of light magenta ink." Never mind the fact that I had it on order and there was none in the United States. It was my fault we were out of it. Naturally, for the next three months I got a daily ass chewing over that.
There were just so many things. I can't even remember them all. You know why I didn't walk out the fucking door? Because fourteen people's livelihoods and three investors' money were 100 percent dependent on my ability to withstand this man's shit.
You know what's really weird? I still carry this bastard with me everywhere I go. I lay in the cab asleep at night and hear him scream. I see the tire cover he had on his truck on someone else's car and hear him scream. I see some of the vehicles I wrapped and remember all the things he didn't like about them. I see a green truck, and hear him flip out--there's a phenomenon called "reciprocity failure" where you print something gray or brown and have it come out green, and we had it big time. I run US 30 through Ohio, see the exit for the town he's from and think "am I going to see him on the road?" (I don't think that's going to be a huge problem since I'm running in Texas now, but there's always the possibility.) I drive through Waco and think of the gallons of Dr. Pepper he swilled. He's always with me. I can't get rid of him. I wish I could. I feel like a woman whose husband beats her--all I need is a pair of cute jeans and a copy of "Stand By Your Man."
This is the place I got laid off from because of lack of work. Check this shit out: A few weeks ago I was waiting for a shipper to load me and I got a call from the president's assistant. He was all apologetic and shit..."I picked you to lay off because I was afraid for your life, but the person we kept can't do the work. If I get rid of (name of production manager), would you come back?"
A request: No one post the words "you win." I don't want to win. I want to evict him from my brain and I don't know how.
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