That's Not a Rat I Smell

One reason I like installing solar panels is it puts me on a roof, providing a unique perspective on parts of this unique island that I would never otherwise see. Most of my interactions with Long Islanders take place on the roads and in box stores, which can paint an unflattering portrait of a craven populace jockeying their SUV’s and shopping carts as they race to collect things. But from a few stories up, I have developed a tentative fondness for my adopted land.

Last Fall, I spent a few weeks on top of my first flat commerical roof: the blower building of the Bergen Point Wastewater Management Facility - a great example of a place I would never visit otherwise. Translated from technocratese, this is where Suffolk county’s poop goes before they make it go away. Something like a million Mr. Hankies per day, assuming mass regularity.

The view on this job was mostly spectacular. Our panels were angled South towards the sun as it tracked over the Robert Moses causeway and lighthouse, passed an inlet with a nice public dock for fishing, crabbing, or picnicking, then arced over the Great South Bay towards Jones Beach and points West. Along with the wastewater treatment facility and marina, the inland portion of the point is also home to a public golf course trampled by retirees. This vista is sullied only by the relentless fecal/chemical smell carried by the prevailing winds that pass over the 8 gigantic pools of churning brown sludge on the West side of the building. About 10 yards wide by 10 yards deep by 100 yards long, the pools are aerated by blowers until the mixture is inoffensive enough enough to be pumped under the bay and the barrier island, to a egress at the bottom of the Atlantic, 3 miles off shore.

The bosses get ready to take a dip

Constantly blowing gigantic bubbles in gigantic pools of fecal sludge is an energy intensive process, making the plant the biggest consumer of power in Suffolk County. The panels, along with other recent modifications, are an attempt to “green” the facility, though the amount of energy produced by our PV system amounts to little more than a shake in the urinal. Still, the county was willing and able to pay for the best, with features like rubber coated metallic conduit instead of the typical PVC pipes. Despite the bad economy, the plant seemed to have deep pockets. That may be because no watchdog wants to go sniffing around down there. If the guys cleaning up our nasties say they need X amount of dollars, we taxpayers hold our noses and hand over the check.

There were a lot of guys there with a lot of trucks and tools to play with. I’m not sure what exactly they did all week, but they seemed proud of it, and even prouder of the Harleys they rode on the weekend. We dealt mostly with two overseers working out of a trailer. One guy named Bob popped above deck now and then to check on us. Bob was genial, if not particularly quick or suave. However, I couldn’t help but notice he drove a quick, suave BMW M3. Bob’s boss Bill never appeared on the roof, presumably because he was about 300 pounds overweight. He mostly could be found at his desk overseeing the work of the editors at Newsday. I'm sure there was an even lazier guy overseeing him, but I never saw him.

Because this was a county job, our company was required to use union labor, and all workers had to be paid “prevailing wage” for their trade. The roofers and electricians met this requirement, but we PV (photovoltaic) installers don’t have a union, so Neal said I would get paid the prevailing wage for an electrician, or else foreman, which was somewhere around $80 an hour. That sounded just fine to me. Neal didn’t care how much it was, because the he submitted his labor and materials costs to the plant, and they covered that, plus 14% for Neal and his partner, the percentage above the cost that he bid for the job.

A couple of days into the job, a burly union rep also named Bob huffed his way up the ladder uninvited and asked Neal if we needed any union labor. Neal curtly told him we did not thanks. They glared at each other for awhile before Bob took the scissor lift down, promising to return.

Two days later, Bob’s jowly mug dawned over our roofedge horizon again. Neal was away for a long weekend, so I had to talk him down this time. I politely explained that Neal wouldn’t be back until Monday.

“Well, tell him to get in touch with me ASAP. Bob English. He knows my number. The DPW says they’ll pay for us to put a union guy on this job.”

“OK Bob. I’ll pass it on to him. I can’t make any decisions, and Neal told me you might be coming by and to say that we didn’t need anyone.”

“Well, you tell him we want a guy on here. If not, we’ll have to picket, and get a rat out in front of here and everything, and I know he doesn’t want that. It’s not going to look good, and I know he is looking to get other county work, but he knows there are other outfits that want the work, too.”

“Ok, I’ll tell him, but he is out of town until at least Monday.”

Bob glowered at us for awhile, then went down the ladder. Our new installer, a twenty something named Mike, ranted about it for awhile, since we had exhausted other lines of conversation such as Mike’s proficiency in Texas hold-em and his hobby of making his own armor and weapons for battles at medieval fairs. (see Mike below hurling lightning bolts)

Young Mike was outraged that Bob’s job was to basically bully us into paying his friends too much to do work that was rightfully ours. I had seen those rats before outside of other work sites, and never knew what to make of them. My natural inclination is to empathize with the working man, but there was always something offputting about the demeanor of the rat and the listless handful of workers loitering in the rat’s shadow. Now that Bob had outlined the scam for me, I was a little outraged myself. I was also a little underwhelmed. There was probably a day when Bob would have returned with a few more of his brawny union brothers, ready to smash us and our panels with tire irons. That would certainly be more persuasive than milling around in front of a giant Chuck E. Cheese.

Ooh, I'm scared

Still, I was willing to consider Bob’s modest offer. After installing the 108 panels, Sir Mike and I had yet to hand-haul 16 tons of concrete ballast: About 1400 thirty-four pound blocks. I was intrigued by the idea of a highly specialized block-moving union laborer to do it for us. I also didn’t want Bob and his rat to keep us from getting future prevailing wage jobs, which Neal said we had the inside track on.

Concerned, I left a voicemail for Neal about Bob’s visit and threat.

A few minutes later, he texted back:

“How big is the rat?”

Apparently Neal, a construction manager and former union carpenter who had been building on Long Island for 30 plus years, wasn’t worried, so I wasn’t worried.

I texted back: “Nevermind. Sir Mike slayed the rat with his trusty Excaliber, and proclaimed himself King of all Unions on this fair isle.”

I had a few more days on the roof to reflect on the nature of government jobs and union labor, and whether it was a good or bad thing. I was on leave from a union government job back in Jersey. As an tenured ESL professor at a community college, I had locked up 4 day weeks of 15 classroom hours, 30 week years, full health benefits, matching pension funds, and contractually obligated extra pay for any extra work. It is not a job that people leave, but I was lured by a free house with an ocean view almost 100 miles away, and my wife was finally making her MD pay enough to support us while I tried to see if I could make a living in the solar business.

The final days of the wastewater job I worked some with an affable veteran electrician, Richie, who kept asking me questions like: “What did you used to do?” and “What kind of teacher?” As I answered, he kept shooting me squinty looks that asked, “Why on Earth would you want to be out here busting your ass when you could be getting paid to spout off in front of a classroom 3 hours a day?” Finally, he just came out and said it.

Richie has been working almost 40 years. He is 56. He asked me if he looked 56, and I couldn’t lie to him. I said he looks his age, which is better than looking older than your age. He has chronic neck pain. He knew another winter was just around the corner, we could both feel it when the late autumn wind started gusting up on the roof. He just finished paying for his daughter to go to college, and may still have to pay for some grad school because she recently decided she wants to be a teacher.

He is not certain that she can get a job on Long Island, where jobs are hard to come by because teachers are paid and treated well compared to the city. He started as an apprentice right out of high school, but both of his kids went to college, and he is obviously proud that they won’t have to work the way he did. He was perversely glad to tell me that his son already made more than he did driving around selling uniforms, and he got a company car, too.

So my trajectory, from professor to PV installer, is more than a little bit perplexing to him. It looks like the opposite of the American dream.

“I like to pee outside,” I offered in explanation. “I like being on a roof. I don’t mind working. No one bothers me. It’s peaceful.” I didn’t add that I didn’t plan to labor forever, that if I go this route I would start my own business. I didn’t add that I don’t mind sporadic working since it gives me time to write, and that the part of me that doesn’t want to be a teacher or a solar panel installer wants to be a writer. That would make me sound like the dilletante I am. I did add that I am only on leave from teaching, that I could always go back to it, In fact, I was thinking real hard about going back to it when we never got our union laborer and I ended up lugging most of those 1400 concrete blocks around.

“Yeah, I like to be outside, too,” he sighed. He misheard “pee” as “be”, but it is really the same concept. “And no one bothers me. But it ain’t any fun to be out here in January. If my wife was a doctor, I would stay home, watch the kids, make sure dinner was hot on the table for her every night.”

Yes, that was the fourth possibility: be a stay at home dad. I did quite a bit of SAHDing during Darcy’s residency (even though I taught full time in the evenings), and do a fair amount of it now, and it wasn’t as easy as Richie made it sound. Hours at home with young children go by slower than hours in any workplace, blue or white collar. Women survive it by engaging with the kids and/or connecting with other moms. I can only play patty-cake so long, and I can’t see myself breaking the gender barrier on group playdates. I’ve heard the things mothers talk about when they get together, and I can’t bring myself to talk about them.

The job ended, and, challenged by Richie, I left Bergen Point more unsure than ever of which direction to go in. Should I go back to the cushy cocoon of teaching, even if the thought of it didn’t thrill me? Should I strike out on my own, starting a business as a solar contractor? Should I take an even bigger leap and try to make a living as a writer? Through the winter, I spun from one decision to the next to the next and back to the first. The one thing I figured out for sure was, as much as I love my kids, I don’t want to be a stay at home dad.

I envy Richie. He knows what he is. An electrician. He is in a respected trade, with a good outfit. He takes pride in his work, makes a decent living, seems happy, and was eligible for retirement in three years.

Before climbing down the ladder at Bergen Point for the last time, I took a final gulp of the views and the smell. It was beautiful up there. The smell was awful. There was a good and a bad to every job, and you always got used to it.