Being the Better Person, It Ain’t Easy

Discussing a disconcerting episode from the recent past that has been eating at me.

About a year and a half ago, I was the crew leader on a moving job. The other two crew members were a black guy named Brian and a light-skinned Gen Z kid whose name now escapes me.

I had worked on a couple other jobs with Brian. If you’ve worked at a moving company, you’ve probably encountered the type of mover who always wants to “run stuff to the truck.” Now, obviously, items need to get to the truck, however “running stuff to the truck” is often the easiest and most mindless task on a moving job. You can turn your brain off and push the furniture dolly down the hallway. You don’t have to do the tedious and time-consuming work of disassembling items. As a crew leader, it’s a big-time red flag if a crew member just assigns themselves that task without even consulting you. Brian always assigns himself that task, or at least tries to.

I’m generally a pretty lenient crew leader so long as you’re not doing anything that might cause damages or upset the customer. I try to be conscientious of coworkers’ needs. I give rides home to some colleagues if they need them. I always stop for drinks on the job if someone asks. That said, in order to pack the truck in a way that minimizes the risk of damages, things have to come out in a certain order, and I need crew members to listen to me when I do give a command.

Brian, of course, just wants to do whatever the fuck he wants. I was one of the few white guys at the company, and literally on my first day I had a black coworker calling me every famous nerdy old white guy he could think of, in front of everyone, doing the nasally white man voice that black guys love to do. In text, you could maybe interpret that as good-natured ribbing of the new guy. It was not. It was very mean-spirited. Brian was always injecting race into everything. Because I hadn’t been at the company that long, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing my crew members, so I was stuck with whoever was assigned to me.

On the day, in question, we were doing an apartment-to-apartment move for a single white woman who looked to be in her 30s. The complicating detail was that she needed packing services. That meant there would be a bunch of loose items in her home that we would have to pack into boxes. If you have a job where you are packing boxes, that needs to get done first.

So we get to the first stop, and what does Brian do? He starts running shit to the truck. I tell him we need to pack first, there are multiple rooms full of stuff that needs to be packed, including the kitchen with a ton of fragile items. I know packing sucks, but it has to get done. He doesn’t listen, he keeps running shit. I ask him to bring up more boxes from the truck so I can pack. He doesn’t. At first, I figured the light-skinned kid would be a decent worker. He brought up some boxes, so I thought he was interested in helping. I expressed frustration to him about what Brian was doing. Well, the light-skinned kid ran and told Brian, causing Brian to get in my face the next time he came upstairs from the truck, insisting I was “talking shit about him behind his back.” Motherfucker, I complained that you’re not listening, which you’re not.

Brian then proceeded to sit in the truck cab for an hour, sulking and not working. Gotta be some of the most unprofessional, embarrassing shit I’ve ever seen on a job, and I’ve worked for three different moving companies with a cumulative experience of about eight years. I was worried the customer would see him and complain she was getting billed for a three-man crew and one of them wasn’t working.

To her credit, the customer was way cooler than she could have been, given we went about three hours over estimate due to all the time Brian and the light-skinned kid were wasting, meaning her move likely cost about $500 more than it should have.

For a bit, I was engaging in some chit-chat with her while I was packing her boxes, anything to keep her distracted from what the other two guys were doing. At one point, I think I was discussing my dog and since I’m single I don’t have anyone else to walk her when I’m not around.

“You’re single?” she asked. “I’m single!” Most guys know that when a woman doesn’t want you to hit on her, she makes sure to drop conspicuous references to a boyfriend or a significant other. By the same token, her mentioning she’s single like that might be a subtle invitation to ask her out.

The key word, of course, being might. In general, my position with hitting on customers is you have to let them make the first move. Plus, y’know, being someone that was MeToo’d, even under false pretenses, it gives me pause about making a move in a potential gray area. So I did not ask her out.

For the time being, I’m just happy that she’s not yelling about us taking too long and asking to get on the phone with my boss.

Unfortunately, I can’t spend all day having a chinwag with the customer. I finish getting everything into the truck. It’s not a small job; she filled a 24-foot truck, and the load ended up taking nearly five hours when the entire job was estimated at 4-6.

I’m already coming to terms with the fact that we aren’t getting tipped (we definitely don’t deserve it) when I start the truck to drive to the second destination, and Brian, for whatever reason, begins screaming at me and berating me the entire 25-minute drive over there. Love to get screaming at while I’m driving some huge moving truck. The light-skinned kid is amused, giggling like a little faggot while this racist black retard is laying into me. So these two are ganging up on me, despite me never having done anything to either of them. I never even met the light-skinned kid before that job. Just a fucking nightmare day.

At that point, I didn’t even know whether Brian would resume working once we got to the second stop. Judging by the childish screaming session in the truck, it didn’t seem like it. Yet when we got there, he was willing to run stuff from the truck to the freight elevator. Go figure.

With all the stress of those two numbnuts trying to ruin my day, I accidentally left one of our dollies at the first stop. When I told the customer, she offered to go get it herself while we moved stuff into her new place, and to pick us up personal pizzas on the way back. Like I said, she really had a great attitude. This might have been one of my worst days ever if she didn’t.

After the job finally ended, Brian still had the nerve to ask me for a ride home. I dropped him off as close as the route back to the warehouse would get us, and I shouldn’t have done that much. I should have make his sorry lazy ass walk.

I don’t like to snitch on coworkers, and rarely do, but these shitheads forced my hand. At the very least, I was going to tell the bosses not to put Brian on my crew ever again.

The problem, though, was that even though I was a crew leader, it would be my word versus the two of them.

Fortunately, the night before my next workday, that customer wrote a lengthy email to the company praising me for working hard and essentially having to overcompensate for the dead weight of my two dumb-as-rocks racist colleagues. So she did notice how much they were sandbagging on the job.

Let’s just say a testimonial from the customer carries a lot more weight than anything any of us would say.

So the manager I spoke with assured me that Brian would not be on my crew again, and told me he would dock him an hour of pay for the time he spent sitting in the truck sulking. Again, I don’t like to mess with people’s money, but Brian left me no choice. Also, fuck him.

It’s a testament to how shitty that company was that Brian wasn’t summarily fired. That was the most clownish shit I’ve ever seen a job and a decent company wouldn’t put up with that for a second.

I did move on to another job shortly after that nightmare day. I was ready before that, but that day really created some more urgency.

Theresa postscript: A couple months later, I had landed a new job that was better than the movers in almost every way, though unfortunately not good enough that I have to give up DoorDashing on one or two of my off days.

One day, I was in an Aldi, gathering groceries for a delivery, when out of the side of my eye I caught Brian passing me in the aisle. I feel anger well up in me, but I stay on task, focusing on the shopping list in front of me. Brian can’t leave well enough alone. He decides he’s gonna say hi to me, like we’re cool and go way back. Of course, I’m sure he thinks he’s rubbing it my face for giving me a terrible day.

I’m staring at my phone. I hear, “Hey it’s Brian, from the movers.” I don’t look up. If I look in this asshole’s face, I’m gonna snap. I’m gonna crack his skull open and play with his blood in the middle of this grocery store.

I mutter something without breaking view of my phone and continue with my day. He walks off, hopefully to catch cancer. Part of me hates that I didn’t cuss him out and beat his ass, but ultimately he’s not worth it. I’m barely hanging on as it is. I don’t need to catch a charge from fighting in the middle of a supermarket.

I’m sure he thinks he punked me or something. Please. I would’ve wiped the floor with his scrawny ass. Racist blacks love to believe that all white people are shook at the very sight of them. In self-hating white liberal areas, there’s some truth to that. I had a close black friend in high school who would gush to me about how much fun he thought it was to scare white people. I wonder if the 2020 Summer of Floyd convinced quite a few black people that liberal whites will grovel at their feet no matter how much you bully them. Something has to account for all the fucked up racism and mean-spirited behavior I’ve gotten from black people the last five years. It certainly doesn’t help that in that span I’ve worked low-status jobs where I’m surrounded by black people. Believe me, when black people outnumber you, they really let the racism hang out.

I wrote three years ago about a black trainer at the junk removal company telling me, point blank, “I hate white people. You look like a Fed.” When I worked at the casino the next year with the majority black clientele and majority black management, one day my colleagues were having a conversation about racism they experienced in the workplace. I chimed in with my story about the trainer at the junk company. One of the black casino supervisors laughed in my face, like “yeah, that’s what you get.”

Racism doesn’t get much more explicit than that.

Occasionally, I think back to this awful moving job. I fantasize about kicking Brian’s teeth in. I wonder if I should have hit on the customer. Though I think part of the reason I didn’t was that I wasn’t that into her, and getting into a relationship only because I’m lonely is not really a great recipe for success. People do it all the time, I’m sure, but it wouldn’t have been fair to her. Oh well, at least I got that pizza.