Once upon a time I ran a union demolition crew at a power plant in rural West Virginia. During a particularly difficult portion of of the project my crew was assigned to work inside of the burner room; removing concrete casing. At the same time there were welders working nearby, in that same coal-dust encrusted cavern of metal.

Well, one day, I guess this welder got bored. So, while I had my crew working in one spot, he climbed the scaffold, working about 30 feet above us. This dropped sparks directly on us constantly.

So, being the diplomatic boss I am, I climbed up the scaffold, got the guy’s attention and asked him how long he needed to be in that spot. He acted oblivious to his fiery droppings and our existence in general. He told me he’d be done in 30 minutes or so.

Since it would take a while, and, since union crews don’t normally just sit idly by, I moved my crew to the other side of the structure and started working again.

It wasn’t 10 minutes before that same welder started shooting sparks on us again.

I got confrontational with him, moved my crew; wash, rinse and repeat for the remainder of the day.

I decided this was going to end one way or the other.

The Skid Loader (BobCat) operator had to leave everyday at 3pm. Since I was certified, and he was a friend of mine, I grabbed the key from him that afternoon “just in case we need to clear a space with it”.

That particular welder was well known throughout the local unions as a guy who ditched the end of the day to avoid cleanup. And, like most slack-asses on the site; he ducked into a porta-john to wait out the last hour of each day.

Well, I watched closely as he went into the middle john of a row of 13 of them lined up neatly across the side of the building. After a couple minutes I took the skid loader and pressed that john (and one on each side of it) firmly against the building. I turned off the little BobCat, took the key, and went to my car to watch the show; all the while ignoring his screams for help.

It took a while, but people eventually came to his aid. Since no one else had a key to the Skid Loader, they used the boom truck (a small, portable crane) and tried to pull the BobCat backwards. Since I had locked it down tight with the anchoring gear, they soon gave up.

Their only other alternative was to pull the johns out. The first, just to the right of my victim’s, popped out quite easily. Then, they hooked to the top of his john, they pulled and pulled and the little BobCat held tight. Until suddenly, his john flew out from between the machine and building, landing hard on its side, covering him in blue liquid, urine and turds.

Once he crawled out, I walked down the hill, looked at him and laughed and said “dang, I didn’t know anybody was in there during cleanup. If you guys needed the key all you had to do was ask, you didn’t need to make a mess like this.” I threw the key to a supervisor on scene and laughed all the way back to my crew.

And he never showed up on a job site where I was stationed again