The First Rule of Plumbing Club Is...

A week or so ago I wrote about the difficulties of starting a new job and set forth a very simple rule for acclimating yourself to a new group of work associates: Be cooler than your predecessor.

While adhering to that rule has been pretty easy for me, primarily because my predecessor was an asshole, I didn't have any rules to help me with unexpectedly coming face to face with said asshole, whose job I now have.

It was all very surreal as I was attending my very first meeting with the local Nashville Chapter of the American Society of Plumbing Engineers. Yeah, it was as horrifyingly boring as it sounds. The whole thing was just messed up from the start. Our entire plumbing group was supposed to go but due to a series of bizarre medical issues, only two of us were healthy enough to make it, though I wish I had some sort of medical issue to preclude me from attending, like an appendicitis or something. As the case was, I didn't.

So two of us drove down to the Golden Corral at Cool Springs, south of Nashville. That's right, I said the Golden Corral. For those that aren't familiar, the Golden Corral is basically like a barnyard feeding trough for humans, only everything is deep fried carbohydrates. I think they even deep fried the spaghetti and the mashed potatoes. Ridiculous. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why the hell we would have a meeting at the fucking Golden Corral, but when I got there I realized I was thinking in my hippie, crunchy, Whole Foodie mindset, which is pretty much the opposite of how you want to be thinking when walking up to the Golden Corral. It's basically like the difference between going to the doctor in the mindset of getting a quick physical exam and instead getting an unnecessary kidney transplant.

The place was busy – much busier than I expected for the middle of the day on a Monday. Who needs an all-you-can-eat buffet for lunch? I suppose the answer for that is - who doesn't?

I saw a dude with two small children that had the hyperactivity levels of spider monkeys, put six cookies on a plate, add some M&M's, and cover the whole thing in chocolate syrup. I think I got a secondhand cavity just by watching the guy.

I also noticed an abhorrently large number of people using gravy, and generally on things that I don't normally associate with gravy. Fried catfish? I'll have a side of gravy with that. Hamburger? Throw some gravy up on there. Salad? Do you have gravy dressing? Actually, that's a lie. No one ate a salad.

At any rate, the meeting consisted of about 25 other engineers, vendors, or general people interested in plumbing shit, most of whom were old dudes in golf shirts displaying the logo of their company¹, trading "war stories" from previous plumbing incidents like, "back when I was doing work at the Pentagon…" or, "this one time in Roanoke when the pump blew up…" or, "I was knee-deep in shit…" blah, blah, blah. It's not that I don't have war stories; I do. Like the time I was working on the pipeline for an oil company and had an environmental disaster on my very first pump station removal project (which is another story for another time). The thing is, no one really cares about that story just like I don't care about their stories.

After the pleasantries we descended on the buffet before sitting through an hour-long presentation on Oil/Water Interceptors. I struggled to find anything "healthy" or "good" at the buffet. I was the exception though. When I returned to the dining room with a plate full of lettuce, rice, and chicken, I felt like I walked into a small aquarium filled with sharks where someone had just dumped a couple gallons of chum. There was no talking, just the sound of violent mastication with food and gravy flying everywhere like it was not just the Last Supper but the last supper ever. That's when I really realized why we were at the Golden Corral.

Even though I just barely scratching the surface of the buffet, after eating I still felt like someone kicked me in the stomach. Or perhaps more appropriately, like someone stuck their leg down my esophagus, kicked my stomach from the inside, then left their shoe there after retracting their leg. I started to get nervous that I'd have to return to the office, find the latest issue of Motor Trend and let everyone know I was going to be in the bathroom… for awhile.

But anyways, back to the beginning and the aforementioned asshole:

My predecessor, who I didn't know as my predecessor until after the fact, came bursting into the room like a tornado. Picture Chris Farley minus the intentional physical comedy, if that makes any sense. He went straight for my new coworker - his old coworker - and gave her a huge hug. I found this extremely odd given my lack of perspective on the situation. In my mind, I knew the guy only as another member of the ASPE organization. Given his gregarious and overly physical method for greeting a fellow ASPE member, I was left thinking to myself, "what the fuck kind of organization is this???" In retrospect, his greeting was actually more hilarious with the knowledge that my new female coworker hates him. It also lent credibility to a story I heard about him earlier – one time at a happy hour he had a few too many drinks, got a little overly touchy-happy with some of the coworkers and ended up kissing one of the females on her back. Her back! That's just comical on a lot of different levels that I don't even really need to comment on.

Anyways, after the hug he turned to me and introduced himself only as Danny. I introduced myself at which time it became obvious to him that I was his successor. Like I said, I still didn't know him as my predecessor, so in retrospect again, it created a very odd interaction that I was not perceiving. I mean, how would you feel if you had been fired, not because your firm was downsizing or restructuring, but simply for sucking at your job, or life in general as it were, and you came face to face with the guy who had been hired to suck less than you? My first inclination, for one, would probably be to pick my nose behind his back and stick my finger in his soft drink. (Shit. I just thought of that, so now I'm going to go throw up a few times because I probably drank several of that dude's boogers yesterday. That's gross.) He sat down next to me through the duration of the presentation but we didn't exchange another word until the end though I could feel him continually looking over at me and staring for long periods of time. I was like, "what the fuck? Do I have something on my face, like a turd or something? Quit staring at me!"

At the end of the whole deal he gave my new coworker another awkward hug, then shook my hand and said in a very cynical tone, "good luck."

I was like, "uhh… thanks. You too," but in my confusion it came out more like a question than a statement, like, "uhh… thanks? You too?"

It wasn't until we were in the parking lot that I was made aware that he was "The Danny" who everyone hated, was fired, and whose desk I was now sitting at and whose pens I was now using.

Once I was enlightened to that little nugget, I had to relive the entire experience so I could at least compare myself to my predecessor and better evaluate myself against him. I can say now with certainty that at the very least I'm much more graceful than him - he was like a hippopotamus out of water. I also have more hair than him. Actually, to be clear, I have more hair on my head than him. He annihilates me in upper chest and back-of-neck hair. Most importantly, I have much more… how should I say… restraint than he does, which is to say, the dude is a loud ass chatter box. He ended up talking just as much or more than the presenter and he'd often ask these absurd and random questions that were designed less as questions and more as a forum for declaring to the room how much he knew about the subject. That's just annoying, which is probably the best word to describe him. Even then, it was obvious he knows a hell of a lot more about plumbing than I do, which was humbling,  but it also simply underscores the moral of this entire story:

You may know a lot about a lot of things, but the reality is, no one likes an asshole.

That and gravy is not a condiment.

 

 

1. One notable exception to the old-dude-in-golf-shirt population was one of only two females at the meeting, the other of which was the aforementioned new coworker of mine. This woman (not my coworker) was not wearing a golf shirt; instead she was wearing some other type of shirt entirely with a rather large lapel pin. The pin was big enough that I could spot it from 15+ feet and very clearly discern that the image on the pin was a dog. I'm not kidding. She had a 2" diameter lapel pin with a picture of her dog on it. I was absolutely beside myself. I can only assume that her dog is smarter and more amazing than Lassie and the picture was in fact a self-portrait completed by the dog. Why else would you wear a picture of your pet on your person? If my cat could draw a picture of itself, I'd wear it around too, on a big shirt, like the ones you get at the fair because I imagine my cat's medium of choice would be airbrushing, and I would tell everyone I saw, "my cat drew this picture. Do you believe this shit? My cat is a goddamn feline savant. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Do you want him to draw a picture for you too? What size? Triple XL? Yeah, the bigger the better, especially when it comes to a cat that can airbrush like this…"