HUMOR
How a Pipefitter Named Pig-Boy Put the Boss in His Place
Persnicketey, pestiferous Al gets a good puggling
Pigboy was a big guy. Messy, too.
When we first met him, his name was Donny. But that’s just because his parents didn’t know him well enough when he was born yet to give him his true name.
Donny was a labourer at first. He worked hard, and everyone liked the guy. He was big enough to handle the toughest jobs, and maybe he wasn’t fast-moving, but he was always on the go.
We were working for a really fussy foreman. This guy was an ex-army dude in his fifties, and he liked to yell at us like we were in basic training. We all thought it was hilarious, and mostly did what he said.
Al kept his truck spic and span, and he bitched like you wouldn’t believe if the crew trucks or the equipment weren’t clean enough. Al had a rag on his dash that he used to wipe off any little bit of dust, and he used Mother’s brand truck polishing compound liberally. That was the cleanest company truck anyone had ever seen.
At least until Donny got ahold of it one day.
Al’s truck was in the way one day, blocking the Right Of Way so we couldn’t get the boom cat past, and Donny went to move it.
If he hadn’t just been moving water pump hoses in the muddy ditch, that would’ve been fine. His gloves were covered in that slimy, sticky clay, and at some point, he had leaned on the muddy bank with his whole back. Donny was liberally covered in mud.
He jumped in the truck and grabbed that steering wheel, gloves still on his big hands, and moved the truck thirty-five feet to let the boom go by.
When Al returned from his walkabout, stopped to look at the mud on the door handle and running-board, and opened the truck door. Mud on the floormat. Mud on the seat. Mud on the inside door handle.
Mud on the steering wheel.
Al stormed over to the guys and yelled, “Who the fuck messed up my truck?” Everyone just stared, surprised.
“I did,” Donny said.
“You wore your muddy gloves and touched the steering wheel? What are you, some kind of pig boy?”
So, Pigboy he was.
He could clean up, though. Every week, he would put on clean clothes and showed at the closest town’s Kareoke night. Pigboy could belt out almost everything the DJ brought. The big guy would go on the stage and kick ass at Kareoke, then drink too much and show up barely alive the next day.
Pigboy Becomes a Pipefitter
We had a lot of facilities work ahead of our crew, and they needed someone to run the pipefitting truck. Pigboy was in there like a dirty shirt. Before we knew it, he was threading two-inch pipe and gooping it up with that black dope — liberally.
You couldn’t go near anything that Pigboy assembled without getting that black shit on you. Al or the client inspector would come to look at his work and walk away pissed off. Their hands or sleeves would always get a bit of that black stuff on them, and it would find its way into their trucks or on their face.
Al routinely yelled at him to try to affect his behavior. “Pigboy, quit smearing so much of that black shit on everything. You only need a tiny bit. It keeps getting on my gloves, you messy excuse for a pipefitter!”
Pigboy just smiled and said, “I’ll try, Al,” and kept doing exactly what he wanted to do.
His truck cab was a big greasy mess, with thread cutting fluid and pipe dope and sweat and leftover lunches. If you needed a ride with Pigboy, you were getting out dirty.
Pigboy was a hard worker, but he liked to party. Then he liked to sleep in.
One morning, he was extra late. Al went to Pigboy’s camp room and banged on the door. Pigboy let him in.
Al was astounded at how the tiny room was decorated with dirty clothes and garbage.
“We need you at work. We got to get that meter shack hooked up to the line today. Get your act together and get to work!”
“Okay, Al,” Pigboy said.
Al went out into the hallway. Pigboy shut and locked the door, then went back to bed. He slouched in a few hours later.
Al Put Down the Hammer
After Pigboy locked him out and slept in longer, Al was on the warpath. That old army vet was determined to make a better man out of Pigboy. He harassed him daily.
Truck inspections. Safety paperwork. Calling Pigboy out at tailgate meetings. Spot checks on his work followed by lots of yelling, just as if we were in army basic training. Micromanaging all day long.
We all felt sorry for him, but he soldiered on through everything Al threw at him without much of a complaint. It went on for weeks.
Pigboy was a stoic kinda guy. He took things as they came, and had more mental toughness than it seemed. But even a quiet guy like him had his breaking point.
One day, Pigboy had just piped in a small separator shack, and he and his helper were wrapping up their tools. The rest of the crew was nearby, breaking down a boom to load it on the lowbed.
Al pulled up at high speed with his meticulously polished truck and waited for the dust to settle before he opened the door. Can’t let the dust get on that dash!
Pigboy’s face showed his apprehension. He knew Al was going to pin him to the wall yet again.
Al jumped out with a smirk on his face and stomped over to the door of the shack. With a calculated flourish, he pulled a white rag out of his jeans pocket and daintily wiped it across the door’s handle and front. He inspected the rag and turned it to show Pigboy.
“Look at that! Dope all over the door handle.” He pointed to the shack. “You’re going to have to stay late and fix this mess.”
Pigboy grimaced. He had cleaned up his act, and the shack was already in pretty good shape. His truck was clean. Pigboy even looked clean. But Al just wouldn’t let up.
It was already after 6 PM on a Kareoke night,too.
“Can I just get it in the morning first thing? It’s late.”
“Nope, you can do it now, slacker!”
Al stormed off with his usual smirk. He jumped in his truck and headed for town.
Pigboy looked thoughtful.
He walked over to where we were finishing up. “You guys got any spare ratchet straps?”
“Sure, in the driver-side toolbox,” I said. Pigboy grabbed them. None of us asked why he needed so many.
Al Slept In?
Al missed the morning meeting. This was unheard of. Al was the guy that was never late, the ex-army soldier who always beat us to the yard.
His second in command got everything organized and we rolled out to get the day started. Jokes were flying about how perfect army Al slept in.
We all got to the line ahead of him, did up the FLHA and got to work. The straw knew what needed to be done, so we didn’t really need Al. About a half hour later, he came flying in at high speed. He got out of his truck without even waiting for the dust to settle.
“Who did it?” He screamed. He stomped around in a circle, turning red. I was starting to worry he was gonna have a coronary event.
None of us had any idea what he was talking about.
Pigboy had a quirky smile on his face. Al stomped over and pointed a finger at him. “You sonofabitch! It was you!”
“Me what?” Pigboy said quietly.
Al almost ran back to his truck and opened the tailgate. He dragged out a wadded up bunch of two inch ratchet straps and threw them on the ground. “Who did it?”
None of us would say a word. We all knew who borrowed those straps, but weren’t rats. Al closed his tailgate, jumped in his truck and sped off. Then we got the story out of Pigboy.
Al was staying in his holiday trailer down at the campground. Pigboy snuck up on him around 3 AM and quietly slipped the straps around the trailer, right over the front and back door, and even the emergency exit window. He said it took a long time to get the job done without making any noise, and he was sure Al was gonna wake up and catch him, but the old guy was snoring so loud that a bomb coulda gone off without bothering him. So he ratcheted the doors tight and left Al trapped in his trailer.
When Al got up, he couldn’t tell why his doors wouldn’t open. He had no choice but to call for help, but by the time he did, everyone else was at the foreman’s meeting. The safety guy didn’t go to get him right away because he had new hires that morning. All of this made Al a couple hours late, and all he could do was sit in his trailer and rage.
“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” — George Bernard Shaw
Later that afternoon, Pigboy was bolting up some flanges at a riser. Al rolled in, and back to his normal self, waited for the dust to drop before he opened his door. He strode over to Pigboy’s work and bent down to examine the lineup.
“This flange is out of line!”
“No, it isn’t,” Pigboy said. He walked over to his truck and grabbed a two inch strap.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“Strap down this pipe on the back of my truck,” Pigboy said with a smile and threw the strap over the deck. He looked Al right in the eyes, and neither one said another word.
He left Pigboy alone — for a few days.