During college I had a job designing houses for a general contractor. When we didn't have design work he would throw me onto the construction sites to help out. One of these sites was for a large house, 5500 sqft IIRC, with a huge deck that was going to need 19 post holes dug. He gave me a shovel, post-hole digger, and a digging bar and turned me loose. I knew it was rocky soil so I grabbed the bar, lifted it as high as I could and drove it toward the soil with every fiber of my being.
CLANG
The bar made it roughly an eighth of an inch before hitting a huge rock. The framing crew was fucking laughing at me as I worked, telling me I should tell my boss to go fuck himself, etc. but that wasn't how I rolled back then. I chipped away at that shit all fucking day. After 8 hours I managed to dig two and a half holes. The half hole I stopped because the entire bottom was one big rock with no edges in sight.
My boss showed up at the end of the day to check my progress and was pretty disappointed. I handed him the bar and told him to show me how it's done. He always thought he was a badass so he grabbed it determined to show me what a pussy I was.
CLANG
I laughed at him. We all laughed at him. One strike and he went and called someone to bring out an excavator.
sounds familiar. My first post-high school summer, I worked weekdays for our long-time family friend who owned a commercial roofing company. He hired me and 2 other highschool younglings (they were 16, I think, I was 18), to work on various projects around the warehouse/office--replace drop tile ceilings in meeting room, improve giant storage shed out back--basically, dig a French drain, and I, being the only one that legally drive for them, occasionally got to take a day to drive a truck with one stupid part out to a team in some other part of the state (Takoma--not the boom truck. uh, not certified for that).
For the French drain around the storage shed, we were given shovels and told to dig a gradient around the perimeter, which was fine and dandy until we hit a granite, well, it was a boulder. The shop foreman whom I will call Mark, because that is his name--a complete waste of humanity with one of the worst attitudes of anyone you have ever met (no one in the company liked the dude--I guess that's why he was in charge of the tool shed and given an office at the end of the warehouse, behind the cage, and not on any work crew), handed us a drill and a bit, told us to drill the boulder into chunks. So, we attack the boulder, bit breaks in about 1 minute. We go ask for another and, annoyed, he hands us another one. Same result.
On the 2nd request, visibly angry, he hands us a third one and something about "do your fucking job and don't break it!" We're like...uh, dude, we're kids and we don't drill boulders. Maybe we need another solution....So of course that one breaks. He starts cursing and stomping about in his denim short shorts and toolbelt (dude always wore that outfit. What a goon), grabs another bit and storms out to the trench with the stubborn boulder. He starts violently attacking it with the drills and cursing all of us, until after maybe a minute the bit shatters into pieces and he tosses the drill into one of our dirt piles. If I remember correctly, he stormed off into the office and was yelling at the boss or maybe one of the office-dwelling VPs or crew leaders about us and/or this ditch. I don't really remember how things ended with that, but I learned that no one ever listened to that guy anyway because his meter was constantly set to angry.
I think our time ended before that ditch was ever finished. No idea what happened to Mark. I think another reason they kept him was that he was one of the few employees/managers that wouldn't disappear for a week or two on a bender. I guess sociopathic dependability is better than "fun" people that you can't depend on.
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