The Five Stages

Subject: My Job

So – I’m being replaced?

That’s an email that I received two days ago from J.B., the maintenance guy at my park in central New York.  He had seen an ad that I had placed on Craigslist, looking for a maintenance guy.  Of course, I did not mention the park by name in the ad.  Identifying details were stripped out and contact was only through anonymous Craigslist relay.  Here’s the copy:

Maintenance person needed for medium-sized well-run mobile home park. Duties include plowing, mowing, occasional emergencies. Compensation includes free housing and cash for overtime. Contracting jobs available as needed.

Must have HS diploma, construction experience, good references.

A High School diploma is mentioned because J.B. doesn’t have a high school diploma, which has prevented him from obtaining a Class C water operator’s license.  References are required because – well, I don’t want another J.B.  But the description of duties and compensation describes J.B.’s job very accurately, and that corner of New York State is a small world.

(…and why was J.B. scanning the help wanted section of Craigslist?  Ask him.)

The first thing he did was screenshot that ad and send it to the manager of that park, Dee Dee, with a ‘WTF’ message.  The second thing he did was fire off that email to me.  The third was to send this email, twenty-eight minutes later, before I had replied:

Subject: My Job

Ok, well I’m not doing anything more outside of my contract untill I get something back from you letting me know what is going on, and per my contract you need to give me 30 days notice prior to termination.

To which I replied, twenty eight minutes later,

Subject: My Job

Of course.  I will also give you some money to help with the move.  I’ll be in the park on Wednesday.  We can discuss then.

The previous week, I had swung by the park.  I have had a trouble getting him to keep his lot and the area around the pole barn clean, and I wanted to check up on it.  The pattern we have established is that I ask him to clean his shit up, he cleans it up, I leave and then it goes back to the status quo ante in a day or two.  This has gone on for at least two years. When I got to the park, the door to the pole barn was open, a car sitting on blocks had its hood open and its engine half disassembled, and what looked like a junker truck was parked in the woods behind the pole barn.  J.B.’s sixteen year-old son was sitting on the floor of the pole barn taking an old lawn mower apart, the parts spread out around him.  I asked, “Where’s your father”, and he said, “He’s not here.”  Then, the mother of the woman who had just bought the new stick-built house across from the pole barn walked by with a weedwhacker in her hand.  She – the mother – had also just bought a home in the park, and wanted to say “hi”.  “Does this bother your daughter?”, I asked her.  She said, “Does what bother her?”  “This.”  I swept my hand around to take in the pole barn, the cars, the toys, tools and discarded building materials on the ground.  “This mess. She has to live next to it.”  “Oh, no”, she said.  But it sounded more like a ‘Yes, but I am unsure whether I can speak freely’.  I said,

“If it bothers her, please let her know that she should tell me.”

“Oh, I will.  J.B. is going to mow my lawn, you know.”

“Just let her know to tell me if it is an eyesore.”

And that was that and I started the drive home.  I told myself that I would ask J.B. about the mess after the drive was over.  Halfway there, I stopped for gas and a piss.  A new email from J.B. read,

3:53 P.M. So, I’m told you think my place is a mess? Besides the kids toys and the stuff I work on everyday after work to get attachments done, what was a mess? 

To understand the rest of the email exchange, some background is needed.  The ‘junker truck’ that I reference is not, in fact, a junker, although it looks like one.  It is J.B.’s work truck.  I had assumed that it was a junker because, well, it looked like a junker, and since J.B. was at work, it seemed that he would have taken his truck with him.

When I first hired J.B. four years ago, he had a different truck.  He told me that, if I bought him a snow plow, he would plow the park for me for free.  So – I bought him a plow, he put it on his truck and plowed the park for a winter.  Then he bought a newer, shinier truck.  When that happened, he told me that he did not want to put the old plow on the new truck but that, if I lent him money for a new plow, he would continue to plow the park and would pay me back in monthly increments of $200.  So, I lent him the money.  He stopped making payments immediately and repaid me two years later, after plenty reminders, by digging a catch-basin for drainage that comes off the ridge behind the park.  Then, he totaled the shiny new truck.  Then, he asked me for money to buy a second new truck.  When I refused, he bought his current truck.  Late last fall, he told me that he could not plow the park the coming winter, because that truck had taken a crap and he needed parts to fix it.  That left me scrambling for a plow guy at the last minute – but that’s another story.

(Because my mind is a closed loop of things I read, saw, did and heard before I was twenty, I am sure that I have quoted the Borges micro ficcion On Exactitude in Science previously on this blog, but like every classic it is evergreen and worth quoting in its entirety:

On Exactitude in Science
… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

The truck is not a junker – it just has an image of a junker superimposed on it, point by point.)

I drive a 2016 Prius that I bought used from Avis with a ding in the hood.  It has 120,000 miles on it and gets 55 MPG on the highway in the summer.

Here’s the exchange:

J.K. 4:32 P.M. Quite a bit.  The car that was being worked on.  The junk truck in the woods.  The stuff lying on the ground and in the doorway of the pole barn.  I am surprised that you can not see this.  

J.B. 5:35 P.M.  First of all that’s not a junk truck in the woods, that is on the road and is MY Truck! Second, nobody ever told me I couldn’t fix MY CAR here! And the doorway of the pole barn was not like that when I left for work and my son was told about it when I got home! 

J.B. 5:36 P.M. Sorry that I’m not made of money and can afford fancy cars like you!

J.B. 5:44 P.M.  And if I’m not aloud to work on my car here then you might better address that with EVERYONE else in the park including Dee Dee because she has me work on hers as well

J.B. 5:48 P.M.  And my vehicles are on the road. There are vehicles in the park that are not even on the road

J.B. 8:51 P.M.  So are we going to talk about how you call my vehicles junk, when there not junk? Just because there not new like yours doesn’t make them junk. And are we going to talk about all of a sudden you not wanting me to work on my vehicles at my home, when it hasn’t been an issue the last 5 years?

Then, I logged on to Craigslist and placed an ad for a maintenance guy.

Since I told him that he has been let go, J.B. seems to be moving through the five stages of grief.  First, he asked me for a written statement saying why he has been fired (the contract is at will with notice).  Then, he told me that he would not move out because our contract does not require him to move out when he terminates employment (it only says that he has the right to rent-free living so long as he is employed – I did not think that the bologna would be sliced so thin when I drafted it).  I said I would be up there on Wednesday to discuss, and I sent him a draft severance contract and release.  After he saw the amount of money that I am willing to give him to help find a new place, he started researching apartments.  He said the severance wasn’t enough.  I sent him a few apartment listings.  He said they were too small for his big family.  I did not answer. His next-to-last email read,

Is there anything I can do to rectify this situation? I really don’t want to uproot my family where they are happy, and be away from my other children that live in the park 

The answer to that, of course, is, “If it could have been rectified, it would have been rectified years ago” – but the task now is to make a clean break, not to argue.  When I did not answer, he sent the following message:

I need a time for Wednesday so I can leave work to meet with you

That sounds like acceptance.  I hope it is.