Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove to a storefront in a plaza out on Sunset Boulevard with a staffing agency’s name on the window and a coffee pot that had been on since God knows when.
Because the hands that carried that money out of the building were not on our payroll.
He’d already brought them in. Four of them, a “trial crew,” working nights alongside us for two weeks while he built his case that a contract outfit could do what we do for sixty percent. Everybody on that floor knew it and nobody said it out loud.
And here’s the thing about a trial crew that a man in a hurry never thinks about. They don’t punch our clock. They punch their agency’s, on a phone, through an app that stamps the time and the spot on the map where the phone was standing when they hit the button.
The agency has to keep that. It’s how they bill us. It’s how they defend themselves when somebody says a man wasn’t there.
I sat in that plastic chair for an hour and a half with my hat on my knee, and a young woman named Priya finally pulled it up for me because I said one sentence to her that I had thought about the whole drive over: “Somebody’s going to look at this in a week with a lawyer, ma’am, and I’d rather it was you and me looking at it now while it can still be fixed quiet.”
Two of those four clocked out at 2:41 in the morning. On the map, that pin sits in our employee lot, not in our building. And the locker with the bad hasp is forty feet inside the door they came out of.
The other two were on the caster deck the whole shift, which is where they belonged, and I made sure that got said out loud later, because two of those men had nothing to do with anything and I wasn’t about to let four get painted with what two did.
The agency pulled them off our contract by Monday. The fifty-five dollars came back through the mail with no note.
Then the plant did something I didn’t ask for. Somebody in the office went into my personnel file to fix my reinstatement date, and found a form in there from 1997 — an employee-of-the-year nomination, a dumb little one-page thing they stopped doing in about 2002, filled out in ballpoint by a millwright named Gus Federoff who has been dead since 2016.
They read it out at the shift meeting. The reason box says:
“He cleans the pit under number 3 by hand every August so the summer boys don’t have to go down there. Nobody asked him to. He has done it every year I have been here.”
I did not know that man had ever written my name on anything. I stood in a room full of people and got taken apart by four sentences from somebody who’s been gone eight years.
The floor manager apologized in front of the crew. He’s at another mill now. The guard by the door that night was a fellow named Ozzie who came and found me at the end of it and shook my hand for a long time and couldn’t say much, and I told him I never held it against him for one minute, and I meant it.
They gave me back my keys and put a new hasp on that locker.
Twenty-seven years of nights and here’s what I know. Everybody leaves a trail now, even the men brought in to replace you. You just have to be willing to drive somewhere and sit in a plastic chair and ask for it politely.