Getting Fired

A career that wasn’t:

After finishing University I got a job working for a landscape gardener in Queenstown. The owner of the landscaping business, my boss, was a Dutch guy called Rudd. Rudd later tragically died, struck by a truck after leaving a local council meeting.

A lot of the work was fairly simple stuff: mowing lawns, felling trees and scrub cutting.

Now, I probably wasn’t the right guy for the job – and learnt from the experience just how unpractical a person I am: I lasted a month, and was pretty cut up when Rudd fired me. I will say in my defense that he fired the guy before me too.

On one particular work day, Rudd picked me up at 7am: we drove to an industrial area, and stopped at a big yard filled with piles of timber and slabs of concrete. Rudd’s face that morning, I noticed, was angry rock on the point of becoming molten at any moment. I knew it was inevitable that one of my impractical incidents would provide the 3000 odd degrees needed to liquidize…

We were there to get several palettes of wood for building a retaining wall. Such was Rudd’s ire that he even swore at the forklift driver, who did not put the wood on the back of the truck exactly as Rudd liked.

The day before had not been a good one: morally I felt we were even, but perhaps work wise I was the cause of the trouble. I had done well using a concrete compactor – a new and strange, not to mention heavy machine - but had left tools in impractical places, always trudging round to try and find them again. My impracticality drove Rudd insane.

The big incident had come at the end of the day with the chainsaw. We were cutting up the trunk of a felled tree. I was holding the trunk, Rudd the saw. ‘Closer dammit, it’s shaking like hell’, he yelled several times. In the end he actually nipped my trousers with the chainsaw, leaving small a hole. He told me I was an idiot – but I think he felt guilty. He was a man full of rage, an old school Dutchman who believed only he was a hard worker. His young family was nice though, and I’m sure he was nice to them. But that’s the position of most conservatives isn’t it? Let’s live a perfect life full of love – but fuck those outside the circle of trust. However, I digress…

After picking up the wood we drove to a rich suburb on the edge of town.

The site for the retaining wall was up a steep rise, inaccessible to the truck. Rudd and I had to carry the beams up there on our shoulders. It became a competition to see who could go faster; the older Rudd putting all his rage into it. With the advantage of youth I beat him on that occasion. However, I was then humiliated when he criticized the first few beams I laid in the soil – ‘they are not level man! look at this’ – he pointed vehemently at the spirit level.

After working most of the morning on the retaining wall, we headed off to another job. In fact, Rudd dropped me off at a farm, where I was to clear an overgrown field with a weed-whacker. He would come and pick me up at the end of the day. Now if the morning had been tense, things were about to get dramatically worse. Absent minded bumpkin that I am, over long grass I opened the the weed-whacker head to clean it out; unfournatley, I managed to drop one of the metal washers from inside the head...

After some time searching in the grass, I gripped my head, pulled at my hair and screamed inwardly. There was no way I could use the whacker without that washer and I knew there could only be one reaction to this from Rudd, the man had no sides (life is at its worst when there is only one possible result).

Several hours later Rudd pulled up in his white truck. He got out and surveyed the uncut grass as if looking at the worst crime of the century. To him, of course, it was a cataclysmic event: he was paying for this wasted time:

"What happened here?
Lost it huh!
Gone!
Can’t believe it!
You did it on purpose..."

And thus I was fired…