When was studying History in University, ancient history, I uncovered an interesting factoid. People in the past, who shaped history, had a public ally shared 'Cult of Personality'. As long as Alexander the Great won battles, he had friends and he was Great. As soon as he lost, he only lost one battle, he was a loser and his empire disappeared. Over simplification, but after he lost that one battle, he got sick and died, and his great Empire shattered.
Throughout history we have had these cults of personality that have ruled the world. Kings and war leaders. People who made changes in their life on the world that did not survive their demise. Genius Khan, Napoleon, Julius Ceasar etc. And Latinos.
It is like they all have Face and the person with the greatest Face rules. Face is something like personality and you get it through a few ways. You get face because you are the leader. You get Face for being right all the time. You lose it if you are wrong. If you lose it you are dead.
This week my boss took away my Face. He did it without knowing that he was doing it. If I explained it to him, he would not understand, because it is stupid; the entire concept is stupid. But as soon as it was gone, my effectiveness as a foreman evapourated.
Let me set the scene. We had a job to do and the boss was on site. We were moving large stone slabs to make a floor for a building. Big. Four to six people required to move them, hundreds of kilos apiece, one weighed 350kg (I saw the invoice). They were layer next to each other and cut so they fit closely. Then the boss had to leave to do boss things and I was left in charge. The purpose of the job was to cover the entire floor as quickly as possible with large slabs and then to cut smaller pieces to fill the holes. You bring in a new stone and look at it and see we're it fits best with as little cutting as possible.
AWM69. If the piece fit with little cutting it was good. The unspoken thing was that the pad was to be laid quickly; less cutting means less stone used, less cutting means less time spent there, which means lower cost for my boss and greater profit. Look at those characters. The first one is narrow at the top and wide at the bottom. The next is reverse to that and the next and the next. The pattern is incidental, coincidental, but once seen, the Latinos took it as a pattern, the Law of the job. They persisted in remaining ignorant of English for all their years working in English speaking Countries. One of them worked building houses for CenTex Homes in Texas for seven years and knows scarcely any English. Once the pattern was discovered, it was the LAW.
So the next stone went in and there was a small cut needed to be done to make it fit perfectly and I told them to do it. They did, unquestionably. Then I went to get the next stone. I came back and they told me that it did not fit the 'Pattern'. I told them there was no pattern, anything they saw was accidental. They insisted that the stone had to be reversed and major cuts made to fit the 'Pattern'. I told them that they were wrong. I told them what the goal was and the reason and that the pattern they saw was not important. I had to call the boss to ask him what I knew was not there, the pattern, when I got done explaining to him and then to them, they refused to place the stone. They out numbered me.
The boss came on site and they came back to me and told me I was wrong. My boss told them it did not matter, they had turned the stone around and he told them to cut it to fit it and get it done. He just wanted them to stop wasting time. The boss then told me what he wanted me to do the next day.
The next day came and the Latinos treated me like shit. I told them that the boss wanted one stone here and three stones there, so they did the opposite. I told them that the boss wanted an edge four inches from the edge, so they put an edge of six inches. I told them to do things and they treated me like I was lying to them. I was not angry with them as much as frustrated. I was angry at my boss. But how can you be angry at ignorance? You can be angry, but it won't get you anywhere. So I was not angry at anyone, just deeply frustrated. I am deeply frustrated a lot lately, more on that later. I was told to use stencils mde of cardboard that day for the small pieces, but they would not listen to me and insisted making stones their way. We picked up seven stones in the morning to fill in the gaps. We had to cut them on the truck, because three people were not strong enough to move them. They insisted on using one large stone to make one small stone and cutting it so that the rest of the stone was now useless. I told my boss that they were not listening to me and ignoring me. I wanted to leave. I made one stencil, cut one stone and it fit perfectly in place without any fiddling. I gained Face again and they started listening to me a tiny bit. I took pictures at the insistence of my boss and they saw this and they must have thought that maybe, the boss actually was comunicating through me, and that is why they let me make the stencil.
The next day they allowed me to show them that we could get three stencils on one stone. Three! The novelty! Even then, they ignored what I suggested on other things because they KNEW that they were right and I was a stupid Gringo. They would say, see we tried what you said and it did not work, so we will do it our way. And things got worse. I reiterated, when you did half of what I told you to do it did not work, you had to do it all. When they did it all, the stone fit.
Face is gained very slowly and is lost easily. It is based on something stupid, but it is something at the unwashed masses use to determine who to follow. That is the stupid thing. It is based on stupid traits, like how much stone you can lift, on how well you fight and the size of your dick. It is lost by equally stupid things like making a mistake or because other people are impatient, like my boss was. If my boss had been patient and knew or cared how they think, maybe the second day would not have gone so badly and the third day could have been somewhere else. There is a discussion, informal, at work whether there is any cost savings hiring Latino workers at all. The plus is they show up for work everyday, the negative is everything else.
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