Pennywise Strikes Again

Here is a picture one of my millwright buddies from the union sent me of his outdoor Gorilla Glue plant from last summer. Apparently, he got just under 2 dried pounds from her.

The old saying about you see the same people on the way up as down the ladder can be true; when he first got in the union he was my apprentice when I was a journeyman and near the end of my career he was my foreman. :oops:

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Dang nice GG4, I just heard one of the clerks I trained just got hired as a head meatcutter. Feels good really.
 
Pennywise said:
Dang nice GG4, I just heard one of the clerks I trained just got hired as a head meatcutter. Feels good really.
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He's been growing since about high school so he really knows his stuff.

That must feel gratifying knowing you taught him well; you certainly are responsible for having taught a lot of people out here to grow. I actually loved working for him when he was my foreman because he treated me well and it was at GM close to home. A lot cleaner than steel mills and power plants.
 
Kroger was a lot of politics behind the scenes. Hard to get good people advanced. I’ve seen them give dept head jobs to people totally not qualified.
 
Pennywise said:
Kroger was a lot of politics behind the scenes. Hard to get good people advanced. I’ve seen them give dept head jobs to people totally not qualified.
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That totally sounds like construction; in that business, it’s often the, what we call up here, bag-lickers, that became the foreman. I believe yes-men or brown-nosers are synonyms. :rolleyes:

I spent about a year as mostly a foreman and it just wasn’t worth it to me because it was only an extra 15% in pay and you are stuck between supervisors that had delusional expectations and the guys who often just didn’t really want to do anything, LOL. Besides that when you were a foreman you had to stay till the job was done and on shutdowns that meant instead of 12 hours more like 16, 18-24 hour shifts. I worked a lot of long shifts because after eight hours it’s premium time but as a journeyman, I could always go home whenever I wanted but as a foreman, you’re there to the end. One crazy ironworker I worked with stayed 48 hours straight with no sleep on one job. My record was 33 hours.

So in that business, it’s the guys who love recognition and authority that often got the foreman job not the qualified ones so often your foreman had personality disorders, LOL.
 
Yes they are, we trained a bunch of clerks to cut meat and they’re still clerks. They want to pay them $9 n hour to cut when a journeyman cutter makes $19 an hour.
 
Pennywise said:
Yes they are, we trained a bunch of clerks to cut meat and they’re still clerks. They want to pay them $9 n hour to cut when a journeyman cutter makes $19 an hour.
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Sadly that also sounds extremely familiar because they were always clawing back from us one way or another.

ilikemsticky said:
yes they are i big reason for me wanting out so bad was because of the non workers i got tired of picking up after there wortless ass !
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One good thing about the construction trades though is that for every job the contractors can layoff whoever they want for whatever reason so the useless dead weight were usually gone first. Sometimes contractors would lay some guys off before they even opened their toolboxes. I do miss the entertainment factor because there were a lot of hilarious shenanigans that went on.
 
Homer Simpson said:
Sometimes contractors would lay some guys off before they even opened their toolboxes. I do miss the entertainment factor because there were a lot of hilarious shenanigans that
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thats funny i would have loved that i worked with a few youngsters that actually wanted to learn and work but not many of them most kids today havent been taught how to even wash a car they never had chores so they go to work and when they find out its not easy they want out i always said theres the door get the f---k out!
 
I had no room for the lazy ones, the ones that wanted to work we’d teach them all they wanted to learn.
 
ilikemsticky said:
thats funny i would have loved that i worked with a few youngsters that actually wanted to learn and work but not many of them most kids today havent been taught how to even wash a car they never had chores so they go to work and when they find out its not easy they want out i always said theres the door get the f---k out!
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Yes, we had some lazy useless wastes of life in our union but they didn't work much because they just got laid off. There was one guy I didn't know who joined our local when I was an apprentice and I just assumed he was a foreman because every time I saw him on a job he would just be standing there very sternly looking around with his arms folded never doing any work.

I later found out he was just another journeyman on the tools but ended up being the laziest person I have ever met in my life. I had to respect him though because he did nothing with such a grandiose sense of entitlement, LOL. He always called everyone else bag-lickers because most worked and he didn't and I wonder to this day if he was trying to pull the wool over our eyes or if he really believed that. One day he said to me it was sad how many bag-lickers there were in our union because he actually enjoyed millwrighting and I thought to myself how would he know because I never saw him do any.

Oh yeah, he was sent to the oil refinery and on the first day of safety orientation after spending about eight hours talking mostly about fire and explosion hazards he goes out and lights up a cigarette in a non-smoking area and got fired the first day. Those are the kind of stories that made that job bearable.
 
generally speaking, in union jobs, a good work ethic doesn't guarantee promotion...used to be, seniority ruled...thankfully, where I worked, management implemented written test's in addition to serious in person interviews to ensure the qualified person got the job, seniority be damned...weeded out a lot of bogus applicants...cheerz... :high-five: ...h00k...:hookah:
 
Pennywise said:
My next grow will be Acapulco Gold Red mix from Snowhigh. After that will probably be Jamaican Blood Klot, A 70’s Panama Red x Lambsbread
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mid 80's a friend and me scored a pound of lambs breath through some jamaicans i knew. we figured on breaking it in to quarters and using it to pay for some free smoke for ourselves. it turned out to be the real deal.

we got it over to his place and tried a tester. about two hoots in we looked at each other and knew we were not selling a gram lol

was a great summer. actually used the stuff to cement a rep while we sold other stuff lol.
 
dr.h00k said:
generally speaking, in union jobs, a good work ethic doesn't guarantee promotion...used to be, seniority ruled...thankfully, where I worked, management implemented written test's in addition to serious in person interviews to ensure the qualified person got the job, seniority be damned...weeded out a lot of bogus applicants...cheerz... :high-five: ...h00k...:hookah:
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Unions in the construction trades are different because they are kind of a union/capitalism hybrid because not only does the useless weight get laid off first contractors can ask not to be sent certain union members so basically if you are useless you starve.

And it wasn’t so much advancement as not getting laid off that made you the money. Foremen only make 15% more so if you work twice as much as a journeyman that doesn’t count for much. Some apprentices would make more than some foreman depending on hours worked.

What contractors really want is guys that will show up rain or shine night or day and stay as long as they want and you can basically be as dumb as a spud wrench if you have those qualities. Being smart and a good worker also was definitely a bonus though.
 
I’d rather have a mediocre worker who shows up 5 days a week rather than an awesome worker who only works 4 days a week.
 
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