ATale of Byzantine Power Plays, Corruption, Incompetence and Revenge (Part I)

Timeline: 2003 November

I was working for an Irish construction company who had the quirky tendency to pay its workforce late or not at all, use quasi legal foreign workers who spoke little or no English which could prove problematic from time to time on site when you had to explain to them what you required of them, but was still a lot easier than actually getting any work out of the perennially drunk/high on drugs English workers or partially drunk Irishmen they also employed.

They also had the lovely quirk of completing buildings without connecting the pipework that carried waste-water, sewage, or any other number of functions. This was particularly fun to fix as one of the site managers was the brother of one of the directors and he basically wandered from site to site, fucking things up as only an Irishman can and then I would have to be moved to his site to clean up the cluster-fuck-ups he'd left behind.

I was working 6 days a week and was busy basically going through a separation/divorce that quite honestly made the working conditions on site (including the attempted murder on me by one of the workers and his friend on day three of my being hired) seem like a genuinely fun time.

By November I had been working for them for about 6 months and I could do the job, which for the most part entailed managing a bunch of men to do whatever construction project you were on, ordering all the materials and co-ordinating all the various work elements. They shifted me about as soon as I nearly got any site into ship-shape because essentially all their sites were always in a godawful mess that made me realise the building sites I had worked on in Africa, where men who cannot read or write will often be in charge of building sites, made Africa look like the poster-child for organisation and healthy working practices.

It was far from what I hoped and dreamed to do with my life and I had put out some CVs after I eventually figured out the central point of CVs. Which is that you have to lie egregiously on them because employers are stupid and actually believe there are people out there whose only purpose in life is to study, work in and train in a specific role, solely for the purpose of working in their office.

The reality for us Martians is simply that we are forced, on this sick planet, to do work in order to be able to buy stuff like food and shelter and nice shiny things that go ZAP ZAP ZAP DIE EARTHLINGS!

Essentially it's slavery.

So I wrote up a CV and waited and eventually got a call. Someone needed a bilingual Quantity Surveyor for a project in Italy. At the time it sounded like a rescue ship from my home planet.

I hired a Mercedes for the interview, wore a tie and suit and allowed the interviewer to believe it was a company car I was driving, without correcting him when he assumed it. I did have a company car actually, but it had been written off when an empty bus that was travelling way over the speed limit along a road that it was forbidden to be on (for the bus, not for me) wiped me out as I came round a blind corner. There was nowhere to go because the bus took up most of the road and I couldn't see it coming because there was a wall that went right up to the corner of the T-junction I was joining in from. So technically I wasn't lying when I said I had a company car on my CV. I just didn't mention it was a cube shaped object about a metre across in some scrap-yard at that particular moment in time.

The interview went well and I was offered a position as Head Project Quantity Surveyor on a job that involved the construction of several buildings, a post office, a mini-mall, a Youth Activity Center and a hospital in the Aviano US Airforce base in Italy. The fact I was bilingual finally came in handy. So I did the honourable thing with the Irish company and jacked.*

They were assholes and deserved it, except for one Irish guy named Jon-John, who is without a doubt the most extreme case of a pathological liar I have ever come across. Nevertheless I did learn quite a lot from him and he did on at least a couple of occasions protect me from the horrible truth. In one instance the truth was that we had damaged some equipment on one of our sites but he managed to avoid any penalties being inflicted on us as no one could prove it. Though I knew the truth. I didn't feel bad about the main contractor having to pay for it because the main contractor's site manager was a poisonous little shit, ugly as can be, a bald, sweaty dwarf, ignorant, incompetent but worse of all a fucking sneaky lying fuck by the name of Andy.

Now, Jon-John would not be able to tell you his own name without making something up, but essentially he was a good guy, trying to get by in a company of Irishmen and he did try to look after his men, do the best by them and if he could help you he would. In his case the pathological lying was generally aimed at doing good. It really was the first big mental shift I had to make. My samurai honour code had to twist and jump and turn over a few times before I realised not all liars are bad people. But Andy. Well Andy was a vile little shit who was spiteful, envious and just all round toxic. The second time Jon-John saved me was really from myself. Andy had agreed we would do a section of the road in concrete after I asked him and he waited until the last concrete load of the day was compacted to then come up to me and ask why I wasn't doing it in tarmac. At which I couldn't believe he had the balls to do this and told him it was him who had ok-ed it. He flatly denied it and raised his voice. Somehow I managed to control myself and just turned around and left and went to pack my bag. He followed me right into the container and carried on talking but I had entered Zen mode and he really just didn't register I wasn't even hearing him. Eventually he realised this and asked me what I was doing and that got through. I replied I am packing my bag and I am going home and now he registered on my scanner.

It's always amazing to me how even the thickest son of a bitch has an inborn survival mechanism. When I looked at him I guess it kicked in. He actually did a little jump backward and then stepped out of the container and lowered his voice and said there was no need to take it all so seriously...his hands were up. It's weird to me how he realised before even I did what was about to happen. I told him to fuck off and leave me alone and not talk to me. I'd go for a walk and think about speaking to him later and he'd better be polite when I next saw him. He left quietly. 

I think his being a short little shit probably saved his life that day. I called Jon-John and explained the situation to him as well as told him that I really didn't know if I could speak to Andy again without losing it and tearing his ugly mishapen head off his body and burying it under the next section of road. Jon-John told me in loud tones not to fucking worry about it, I was not to talk to Andy, he was a little shit and I should just go home. "Just go home Joe and don't you worry, I will talk to Andy and sort it all out, not a fuck is he getting away with this." For all that Jon-John gave me some shit jobs to do he could tell what kind of person I was and he knew full well where my line was. Or maybe it was that guy who tried to kill me who was left with a broken head that sort of explained I actually had no problems asserting my authority in unorthodox ways. Anyway I was actually done stressing. I went home and from that day I didn't let anything at work ever get to me again. 

When I returned to site the next day, my samurai ideals pretty much committed hara-kiri on that day. I think when I trace back the most pivotal events in my life that actually broke me out of the rigid samurai structure of living I grew up in this was definitely one of the key moments.

Andy had accepted the road will be build out of concrete and was quite demure about it. Jon-John was on site too. They were waiting for me with the good news. Andy looked downtrodden, which I had never seen before. A poisonous dwarf he was, but I had never seen him with a hang-dog face. I kind of looked from one to the other and I couldn't understand how Jon-John had done it.

"It's all sorted now Joe" said Jon-John triumphantly "Andy has remembered I was also there, and heard the whole thing now."

I was confused. What? Jon-John was were? I must have looked confused because Andy spoke up.

"I wasn't..." Jon-John cut him off:

"Now, now, Andy, we've gone over this, I was standing right there when you told Joe he could go ahead and make the road out of concrete, so let's not go over this anymore, it's settled." He waved a hand with his huge round belly proudly extended and smiled honestly at me, beaming, really.

To this day I wonder what my face looked like, but I wish I had a picture of it. I was beyond flabbergasted. Jon-John was nowhere near the site when Andy told me to do it out of concrete, and here he was, looking at Andy square in the eye, telling him essentially he had to take back his lie because he, Jon-John, was also a witness to what had transpired. And he was so boisterously forceful about it that Andy was actually going with it. I swear to God I almost felt my brain do a summersault that day. I just could not believe the genial audacity of this man. What for me was a matter that should really just be settled at dawn with pistols or rapiers, or actually preferably the day before with a katana, was to Jon-John just another day to take in stride and the way he dealt with a lying, dishonest fuck-face was to just boldly look him square in the eye and lie to him to his face about his actual physical presence in relation to the same lying fuck-face. It was beyond anything I had seen. And it worked like magic dust.

Basically Jon-John had just said the equivalent of "Fuck you and your little lie, you dwarf, my lie is bigger, and so is my belly, so I win! Ha-Ha-Ha!" And the dwarf accepted defeat. Naturally of course....

It felt like something straight out of Alice in wonderland.

Andy just shook his head, said he didn't rememeber it (meaning Jon-John being there) but anyway it was agreed now.

So yeah. I felt a little bad for Jon-John, but I jacked anyway.** And I set off to sunny Italy (except it was in December near mountains and was fucking colder than most places I ever visited) to work in a US Airfoce base for  a German company. My wife had moved back in too for some of the time anyway and we were trying to make it work again despite the fact that it was a hellish mindfuck for both of us. I wasn't exactly doing well, but at least it felt like I was getting from 7 foot deep shit puddle to say 5 foot deep shit puddle which I am sure you'll agree, given I am 6 foot 2 would feel like the opening of heaven almost.

My salary essentially doubled overnight and I was flown to Aviano and a five star hotel where I met the German Project Manager and I was given a copy of the contract on CD to read. It was a tome of about 2000 pages and it took me only two days to go over it, and I didn't know how to speed read back then.

My eyes burnt but I was determined to do this job well and by day three I had written a five page summary report about all the potential problem areas we might encounter contractually. When I presented it to the project manager he seemed angry and raised his voice and asked why I had produced a report for him.

I was kind of taken aback but as I had never really worked with Germans before I kind of took it in stride and didn't make any judgement about this weird reaction yet, so I explained he had asked me to give him a summary, which is what I was doing.

"Ja. But vy ovicially!?"

What The Fuck? It was just a report of five pages for his own benefit! But I have Venetian genes, I didn't need to process this in my head. It was instinctive. If he didn't want an honest, official report about the contract, my DNA told me the only right thing to do for my own self-preservation was to make sure the document was as official as possible. Him being German the idea that he could just throw it in the trash probably didn't occur to him. Yet anyway. So my instinctive response was:

"Well, of course it's official, I had to put copies in the files because it's my job. After all I have to do my job."

He was immediately silent after that. Old reflexes and all that I suppose. I had basically just told him "I vas just vollofing orders, Ja?"

He was definetly unhappy about it but he took the report with him to the big meeting with the other managers.

So I had arrived at this luxurious and prestigious firm, Billfinger Berger, a huge German multinational, where money flowed freely like water, mostly down toilets it seemed, and I was now the Head Project QS on a project of some 30 million Euro. Not bad given that a Head QS essentially handles all the financial and legal affairs of a project. Though they did have a separate financial controller which seemed to live in isolation next to the project manager's office and he also seemed to speak or interact with no one else.

I know it's easy to make comparisons with Nazi Germany whenever it comes to schizophrenic Germans in positions of authority, but then again, every sterotype and every cliche exists for a reason. It was pretty obvious that a serious level of disjointed, compartmentalised, miscommunication was going on and that in some cases the level of incompetence did not just border on the criminal, it went far beyond it.

Suddenly it became more than just a suspicion that while the pond of shit was indeed only 5 feet deep, somewhere on the bottom of it were also an unknown number of land-mines. And I was right out in the center of it with a little red flag on my head that said "Lee Harvey Oswald" or possibly "cannon fodder".

Stay tuned for Part II coming soon, where I will reveal more. This is all part of the back-story that explains my recent life-changes which I said I could not divulge earlier. I still can't tell you everything, and some of it I probably will never say, except of course, in the unlikely event of my untimely demise, even by accident, in which case I have taken steps to ensure a veritable shit-storm of information will actually hit front pages of many papers around the globe.

It's called insurance. Venetian style.

* Jacked - A term used in the UK in the construction industry. Leaving your job without so much as a fuck you.

** I saw him a year later and we talked and there was no bad blood between us. In fact he still tried to protect me (from myself again). But that's another story.