I’ve spent a lot of time working for other people, thinking that this side had to be easy. I’m learning that it’s not so.

The latest lesson has been in hiring and firing. My part-time backup operator is moving, so I had to get someone to replace him so I could take weekends off now and then. It’s too small of a job to advertise for, and we’re a pretty small industry anyway. I figured I’d put the word out on the good-ol-boy network.

The one guy I really wanted wasn’t allowed to do side work by his regular employer. Nuts. So another local operator gave me a reference for a younger guy that just got laid off due to the economy. What the hell, he’s licensed and comes with strong references; I’ll give him a shot. He interviewed fine and did a good job when I had him come in to work with me for a day. I had no qualms about his technical competence. I hired him. I gave him a set of keys to the site and to my truck, as he was going to have to use that when I wasn’t around.

But to do this job, one must have specific training to drive on the flightline. Someone fairly high up the food chain has to give this class, which takes about two hours and for which I was going to pay him. The first two times I tried to schedule him, he had other obligations – job interviews – and couldn’t make those times. That’s fine; I completely understand that a full-time job has to trump a part-time job. He gave me a week that he was free, so I had the airport manager rearrange his schedule to fit this guy in on that week. I called him and let him know that date and time, and requested confirmation that he would be able to attend.

Of course, this is when he dropped off the face of the earth. No calls all weekend, no calls or response on the day of the class, nothing. So my last call to him right before the class was to start was that this obviously wasn’t going to work out and that he needed to contact me to bring back my keys. I would have had no hard feelings had he simply called me and explained a conflict. I wouldn’t have hired him, but that’s the way it goes.

But no, he’s still missing. At this point I’ve escalated through polite voice mails, not-so-polite voice mails, and have called his father, an operator at a neighboring system from whom I originally got his phone number. Still no response. I know he’s not in the hospital or in jail or anything as the kid’s googleable and has been active all week. He’s just avoiding my phone calls. This kid has the keys to my system, which is a huge liability.

I don’t know what to do next. I talked to his father, which is unprofessional, I know, but I am running out of options, and also called the guy who originally gave me the reference. I wanted him to know what was going on in case he decided to hire him back again. The kid has just shot himself in the foot as far as working in this industry in this county goes, as we’re all fairly well connected. Do I send a certified letter? Do I talk to the sheriff’s department and see if they’ll do a civil standby with me to pick them up at his house? Do I now have to get a lawyer, and spend some more money? Re-key everything, which includes some county property? I can see that I should not have given him keys until he was fully trained, but this could have happened at any time even if he’d been on the job for a year. I’m just lucky that I hadn’t had him on-call when he decided to stop answering the phone and let the water tower overflow or something.

I was going to have him work for me while I went on vacation. That’s obviously not going to happen, but I desperately need the vacation, so I’m taking it anyway, I just can’t bill that time to my client. So he’s cost me a significant amount of money right there.

How does one handle staffing issues when one is as small-time as I am? At some point, I have to trust people. I guess I’ve been lucky in my employees so far, as the one I’ve got is great. But all I would have to go on with future people is character references from others in the industry, and I think we’ve just seen what that can get you. It’s got me nervous and unsettled about starting all over again, but I have to. I can’t do this job seven days a week for the next however many years uninterrupted and not go insane. I need the mental break sometimes. So when I get back, I’ll call another number I’ve got in my pocket, of another operator willing to do side work, referred by another business acquaintance. And we’ll start this whole circus all over again.

But he won’t get my keys until he can actually do the job.

It’s the same thing, really, from either side of the desk.

You want someone to do things with, so you go to bars or lurk online or hit your friends up for good dating material.

You want someone to work for you, so you write classifieds or lurk online or hit up friends for good employee material.

You’ve had a good long relationship and then suddenly everything goes to shit. They don’t love you any more or they go get another job or they get caught with their fingers in the till, or worse, in someone else’s till.

Then you’ve got to stress over losing that relationship, and finding a new one, and what if you don’t? What if you’re the one doing the firing, what if you’re the one looking for the new job or the new boyfriend?

It’s hard from any of the perspectives.

This new guy looks good on paper but turns out to be completely boring. This new guy has all the right certifications but isn’t allowed by his day job to branch out. That new guy needs way too much training. Do you put the money or the time into the relationship?

I suppose you don’t have to. You can get used to being alone, you can get used to doing the job entirely by yourself. It wears poorly on your sanity either way, and you really want someone to fill the hole the last guy left. You have a life to live, and can’t do it without help.

So you take a chance on a new guy, give him some time to see if he will work out. You let your heart or your career become influenced by someone else’s actions. You have a huge potential to get burned, but there’s hope for something good there. This guy turns out to be the love of your life. That guy can be entrusted with your business on the weekends. Maybe one of them can help you make the business better, but you won’t ever know unless you try, unless you risk.

Risking the business seems scarier than risking the heart did. Maybe that’s coming from the perspective of having emotional safety now, but dating never involved the potential of destroying your livelihood, not the way you did it back then. This though, this hiring of someone new to replace someone dependable, this is terrifying. Having the only candidate be somewhat inexperienced is unsettling. Having this all happening now, at the start of hunting season is directly related to Saint Murphy.

The training of the new guy starts tomorrow. It was supposed to start today, and didn’t. This is not a good sign.

Sometimes, being the boss sucks the big one.

I’ve had a guy working for me as a backup operator for a couple of years now. He’s great: unflappable, capable, and hardly ever goes anywhere so he’s available. I need him to take emergency calls from the system on the weekends so I can keep my sanity. Otherwise, I’d be on-call 24-7 for three years straight. I would never get to go further than an hour from the job, and I sure wouldn’t get to do any hunting.

In the fall, I use him pretty heavily. Every weekend, if possible, I’m up there doing my thing. I couldn’t do it without him and he likes the extra income. It’s obviously not a full-time job, but as side work, it’s pretty easy. He’s only been called out once in the whole time he’s worked for me.

But the company he works for during the day just lost their contract, and the new company’s not hiring. So he was scrambling for a new day job. I’ve been sending him links to whatever I can; it’s in my best interest to keep him employed locally so he doesn’t up and move. He’d threatened to move to Texas if he couldn’t find another job. I was sort of hoping to give him full-time work for a week if he was still unemployed in November, so I could go to Colorado to hunt with Junior.

Turns out that his original company has offered him another job. In Afghanistan. Joy. Good for him, but now I definitely have to scramble for another backup operator. He leaves right around hunting season, and at the same time, my big project kicks up again.

So I’ve been calling around. I work with one of the local city guys sometimes on my side job, and I know he holds the correct licenses. I called him up and offered it to him, but his boss is giving him big flack about conflicts of interest. Seems his boss thinks that their City provides my water too, and therefore he can’t work for the agency twice. That’s news to me – I run this system and I know exactly where my water comes from and where it’s going. You’d think the manager of another system would know the same about his.

I hope he works it out; he’d be perfect. He says he’s a real homebody, and he’s got more experience than I do at dealing with emergency repairs. He does work for a bigger system, after all, and often they can’t just shut a bad section down to deal with during the week like I can. He works Fridays, while my previous guy did not, so I won’t be able to skate out of here early, but late is better than nothing. I’d hate to lose this hunting season, and I’d hate to spend my anniversary alone in the Valley while my husband is up hunting in the hills. I’m supposed to be there too.

So I’m holding my breath. He seems really interested and may push it with his boss, with his union’s help. If not, I’ll hit up the guys at the other local agency. I doubt that they’re as strict with the side work, but I also don’t know those guys as well. I need to be comfortable leaving my livelihood in someone else’s hands. I’m rather unsettled about the whole thing.

This project, the big one that’s consumed most of my Fall, has been getting worse and worse, but I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m working ridiculously long hours busting my butt to get everything done right. Of course, when things go wrong, it’s usually at the worst possible time. Earlier this week, I was chewed out in Mandarin because someone at the tenant’s location forgot to tell the cooks that the water would be going off. That was not my fault, and was rather funny. I knew exactly what that guy was getting at, even though he didn’t speak enough English to know that I wanted him to get someone who spoke English.

Then it got a little worse. A fitting we had to tie our meters in to one building did not fit after all, and it was the end of the day. No replacement fittings were to be had locally, and I had to leave both the customer and the fire department next door off overnight. Not only did I get yelled at by a fireman, he was also rather whiney. I got them porta-potties out asap, and had the water turned on just after noon the next day.

I was worried about this weekend’s jobs. We have a big tenant with two buildings, a call center. I wasn’t allowed to shut both down at the same time, so we arranged to pay the guys overtime to do one building on Saturday and one on Sunday. I was going to be the only one there to turn valves off and on, and of course, I don’t get paid any extra.

The Saturday one seemed to go well. I got a really good shutoff, and the guys got to work install the backflow preventers and meters. We’re required to have these in place at all of our sevice connections by 2010, so I wasn’t just picking on a few customers. It was tricky, in a tight space and really deep, and with some odd pipe sizes and materials, but we got it done. When we left, all was well.

On that note, I wasn’t so worried about the Sunday job. It was a simpler job anyway, so I got there before dawn to cut the water off so we could get to work. We cut into the line we were taking out and everything started to be very simple. Until one of the guys went over to yesterday’s hookup and noticed it was leaking, that is. Great. So we’ve got a leak on one building and the pipe cut clean in half at the other. I told the on-site guy what was going on and we finished the building we were working on so they could have water in one, at least.

After we got that one back up and running, we went over to the leaky one. The plan was to dig it out so we could see exactly where it was leaking, so we could get the right parts to fix it tomorrow. The ground was way too soupy to dig though, so we had to put it on hold until we could get a vacuum truck out there, and the right parts. Of course, none of the rental places and none of the big equipment parts houses are open on Sunday afternoon. We could get it fixed in the morning with a couple of hours of work, and since they didn’t have people in the place until 6:30 anyway, it shouldn’t have been that big a deal. It’s a call center, not a hospital.

At this point, it all went even more downhill. The maintenance manager called me to chew me a new one. She second-guessed every field decision I’d made and got all over me for, “not bothering to inform her when this happened,” never mind that I had immediately informed the maintenance guy she’d left there on call to be my contact. She then proceeded to condescend to and yell at me over every step of our job. She was having an absolute cow, and when she started demanding the names and phone numbers of our contractors, I turfed it to my boss. I do not have to listen to that kind of abuse, and I am sure not going to involve subcontractors in this. We as a water agency are required by state law to install backflow preventers, and by the county ordinance to have it done by 2010. We also have the right, written into the ordinance, to interrupt service to do so. In order to try to inconvenience this big customer less, we worked around their schedule to work on a weekend, which of course, meant that backup parts were not readily available. We did not have to do so.

So after several ass-chewing phone calls, some calls to my boss, and more parts-searching and contractor-coordinating, I am done with that woman. After the personally threatening voice mail insisting that I would be out there with a vac truck all night keeping mud out of the hole (we don’t have one), I have had enough. She can talk to my boss if she has a problem with it. I did not do anything wrong in this situation and went over and above to try to fix it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to pull a fitting out of my ass, no matter how much she insisted that it was “unacceptable” that her precious call-center drones couldn’t have their coffee in the morning. Not my problem man.

Unfortunately, she went way, way over my head and politics talks in this business. She convinced the director that the only time they could shut down was after 11 PM. These are by no means normal working hours, and it’s going to cost the county a boatload, especially at prevailing wages. So one contractor and I will be in at dawn with a vac truck to see exactly what we need. Then we’re coming back out in the middle of the fucking night with lights and people, all so they don’t have to shut down and walk to the other building or to the porta-potties for two hours in the morning.

So if I was feeling overwhelmed with the job overload before, I’m still shaking with it now. I am not able to let it go enough when I get home, and it gets to me too much. I think I’ve lost my ability to relax, and I’m quite sure that I’ve lost any funny that I once might have had. And I just sent in the project description for phase 2 of this bullshit.

It feels sort of anticlimactic, after all of the turmoil and stress it took to write the bid up, but this morning, my next three years’ worth of future was casually approved in a Board of Supervisors meeting.

I sort of knew it would be, as I was the only bidder, and they can’t very well not cover this system. I was feeling fairly superstitious for the last month about assuming that I’d got it. I had plans in my head about how I was going to move on with this next phase of things, but I hadn’t acted on any yet. The most I’ve done is a little window-shopping for a service truck, without any looking in person. I had no contingency plans at all for catching myself if they turned me down.

But it’s all good. I gave myself a little raise, much of which will be eaten up by the new truck. I’m growing out of my pickup, and it will be promoted to my personal vehicle, with maybe a business trip or two in its future. The rest of the raise is going to be squirrelled away into the house fund. I’ve been working on year-to-year contracts for more than ten years now, and that’s not a very stable platform from which to jump into a mortgage. Three years confirmed, now, that’s a little better. Unfortunately, lenders are a little conservative about handing large chunks of money to the self-employed, and want to see two years’ worth of receipts (last I heard) before they’ll take that chance. Which is fine; I can wait and save up a down payment in the next year and a half. And I probably won’t be applying alone then either.

I suppose now that they’re paying me all of this money to run the water system, that I should go get back to work. I’d like to stay employed, after all.

I am really enjoying this new job. I love having fourteen different things to do, all of fairly high priorities. I’ve always worked well under pressure, and now that my body’s adjusting to the stress, I’m rolling with it well.

Some things aren’t all that different from my old job. I still stand around and look at holes in the ground. But a key difference is that I’m in charge now, not just observing. I’m the one shutting the water off so we can cut open a line, I’m the one handing out the notices to the tenants so they don’t get a surprise when they try to flush, and I’m the one who can say, “Enough. We’ll finish this part after the weekend.”

The beautiful part is that I’m still not the one paying for the work. The County’s doing that; I’m just in charge. If I need something done that will cost money, I put a quick proposal together and hand it to my boss, who goes and arranges for the funding. I get to get down to business and just get the work done. It’s fabulous.

Even as I knock things off of my to-do list, more pop on. And I’ll take those as I get them, and be happy for it. I have to plan ahead and prioritize things, so I have work to do for the next six months and the projects get done kind of evenly. I can’t spread myself too thin, but I’m sure I can get it all done.

The first big project that I was working on was sort of an isolated thing. I went around and did my job without interacting a whole lot with the other guys. But now I’m branching out a little more, and working with other people, and I like it.  I went into a building scheduled for demo with a couple of them last week, and salvaged out some good plumbing fittings, and remembered how nice it was to work with good people.

Tom’s got a lot to teach me, and I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with him over the next few months, cramming as much as possible into my brain before he retires. I’m not stupid, and this is the sort of thing that I pick up easily, but there’s so much of it that it’s going to swamp me for a while, but I’ll get it. I don’t expect to learn all of the secrets of the place right off the bat, but in ten years or so, I might have most of them down.

My job satisfaction is at an all-time high, and it’s not jsut because of the money. Oh, don’t get me wrong; the money’s extremely nice, but it’s everything else. It’s getting out there and turning wrenches, it’s shlepping around in a tool belt and hat, it’s getting this place knocked into shape that does it for me. I don’t remember ever loving a job so much. The heat wave isn’t even getting me down.

Now, if only I can continue in this vein for the next ten years, I’ll be golden.

My first full week at the job, and for some reason I was more nervous than for the first few days. I spent those getting myself together administratively, putting together a list of what I need to get done and writing up a giant spreadsheet of existing data.

But today was the day that I had to get out there in the field and start filling in the unknowns on my table. The site’s been sitting unattended for ten years, so I have to go evaluate each building, each service connection, and each backflow preventer. It’s going to take me a good couple of months to get it all sorted out. In the interest of saving some time and really getting to know what I’ve got, I decided to test each backflow preventer right on the spot, rather than just noting them and going back to see if they work. That’s not really the way it’s done, but since I wear both the survey hat and the repairman hat, it made sense.

So I started with an easy one. I picked an empty building with a few irrigation services but no major industrial stuff and I went out and did my thing. The survey part is pretty easy, although I have to train myself to look for different things. Last time I went through these buildings, I was after environmental issues, and now it’s just water. I never had to trace pipes to a boiler or a cooler on the roof before, but it’s not rocket science and I can do it.

Once I got out to the testing part, that’s where it got interesting. Most of the units are not even legal any more, but if they pass a test, I can bump them a little lower on the priority list – we only get so much funding, and this rehab is going to take a few years. I’m finding that it was an Air Force policy to paint the shit out of these things though, and apparently nobody told the flunky doing the painting to not paint the threads – they’re there for a reason. And I’m sure not going to ruin the threads of my very expensive gauge trying to cram it onto an illegal installation anyway. So those are quick – a big fat FAIL and I’m done.

On my way out to one that’s made me roll my eyes for years, I was crossing a well-watered lawn. Since it was getting soggy, I took a step onto a valve box cover, thinking it would be a nice dry place to set my gauge. Not so! The box was actually so full of water that the lid was floating, and as soon as I stepped onto it, it shot out from under my foot like I’d stepped on one of the kids’ skateboard. My leg went down (and it was the bad one too) and the next thing I knew, I was standing about two feet shorter than I usually do, and my boot was taking on water. Well, shit. At least I didn’t break the valves or my leg.

I squished back to my truck after I failed that unit, dumped out my boot, and went on back in to the office to dry out a little. This office may not know what’s hit them – it might have been a better idea for me to office with the working guys, but that’s where the files I need are.

Once I recovered enough dignity, I went on to another building. This one had a bunch of units in assorted boiler rooms, and of course, they were all very spidery and about eight feet off the ground. Fine. I borrowed a ladder, strapped on my shiny new tool belt (which works wonderfully – why didn’t I think of this before?) and reached in past one to turn it on at the valve. And of course, that one had a major leak, which is why the valve was off in the first place, and equally of course, I was standing right underneath the leak. The first I knew of it was as it shot down my back, into my new toolbelt, and giving my pants a double dose of stinky water.

I hopped off the ladder, thought about it, and hopped back on to turn the valve off. I wasn’t going to get any wetter after all.

So, wet legs, squishy boot, wet shirt and tools. Dirty hands from ten years of dust and cobwebs, now wet. Sweaty head. Spiders. Barked knuckle.

And you know what? I really like this job.

There, I’ve got that first week under my belt, even if it was a short one. I was right too; it is going to take me a bit to get back into the swing of being busy all day. I’ve done it before and I can do it again, but I’m fairly well wiped out tonight after three days of sitting in the office. But it was a busy sitting, for once.

I do see that I’m going to have to pace myself. My instinct is to dive in with as many feet as possible and get off to a good start, but that might raise the bar too high for later on. Once I get this site completely ironed out, a process I expect to take about six months, my day-to-day duties are going to be fairly light. And I don’t want them to compare that with a ball of fire earlier and decide that maybe I’m not worth my nice shiny pay rate after all.

But it’ll even out. I have enough to keep me fully occupied for a while, and once I start getting out in the field (next week) my pace will come back to me. I’m quite used to doing field work in the morning and coming in to write things up in the heat of the afternoons.

It is weird to have all of these people around though. My old office has only had the four of us regulars for several years now, and it’s funny to see new faces. I knew some of them before, which gives me a head start on names at least.

And I like my new office. I’ve got it all filled up already, and I can see that I probably won’t have enough bookshelves or room to put them even if I scrounge them. My manager rolled me down a chart table yesterday, that takes up much of the free space when I open it, but I’m going to need it.

I have an enormous shopping list going too. The smaller stuff may get bought this weekend, but I’ll wait to get a ladder and a shop-vac and a truck-mounted valve-actuator until I actually need them. But I have begun the search for the perfect tool belt, as it’s becoming clear that I’m going to have to be dragging my equipment into some awkward places. It’s surprisingly hard to find the right tool belt – they all seem to be made for carpenters, and I’m more of a plumber. Yes, it makes a difference. My tools are mostly longer.

And yes, I might model it for you, if you ask nicely, perhaps with a nice ensemble of steel-toed boots and hard hat?

This is my last day here, and my ten-year anniversary at the site.

I’m so nervous about the whole change that I’m not sleeping well and my stomach is seriously revolting today.

My office is cleaned out and my truck is loaded up. As soon as the idiots who decided that they needed a last-minute site tour (after I’ve turned in my mileage expense report, of course, so they’re not going to get to see anything which requires my truck to get to), I’m going to run my boxes down to my new office and see if I can’t get a key. I like to start work at least an hour earlier than most of the office weenies do, and I can’t always go straight to the field.

I have very mixed emotions about this change. It’s huge and life-altering, but I know it’s a good thing overall. I’ve really enjoyed this job, but the people here have been such assholes lately that I’ve decided not to do that ongoing consulting work that they asked for. I do not need the money, and it’s so good to be able to say that. I just want to walk away from the rampant bureaucracy, although I know damn well that I’ll be walking right into another set. But hey, at least as a contractor, I won’t have to fight for budgets or deal with the Board. I can just do my job and submit my bills peacefully.

But still. Queasy tummy.

So. All has been quiet on the business front, except for boring niggling details here and there, and I decided not to wear y’all out with babbling about it endlessly.

But today was the real decision point. I signed the contract, but the County wouldn’t execute it until the Board of Supervisors formally approved the expense. I went and sat in on the meeting this morning so that I could know my fate as soon as possible.

It was approved with twenty other list items in about five seconds, after sitting through some presentation that went in one ear and out the other. How anticlimatic.

So I rushed back to my office and immediately quit my job. I yanked that net right out from under me, and I’m stepping out on the high wire on August 1st!

I’m all sorts of nervous, yes, but that’ll settle down. The details I have left to manage will calm me some, and then just getting down to doing the work will be fine. I do have to wonder though, what was I thinking, starting a physical, outdoor job in August? Clearly, I’m insane.

But I’m insane and my own boss.