As for work, our company was at it’s peak of prosperity. I was running three or four store build-outs at a time, doing all the incoming bids in my office room several mornings each week, and mildly flirting with Victor’s beautiful secretary Madeline, who sat right outside my open office door at her own desk, like a perfect picture one never tires gazing at.
Afternoons I’d be driving in my Vitara from job to job, all over town, making sure each build-out was running smoothly, putting on my own tool-belt whenever I could, a few hours each day or more, wiring up transformers and panels. I ordered the materials I needed for each store while I was driving between them. I knew the lists in my head. They were all nearly the same. We had credit lines with three large supply houses.
I bought so much that I’d have my own personal salesman taking my orders and pulling them, ready for me to pick-up as soon as I arrived. They treated me with first class attention because of so many big orders, thousands of dollars each week. I was flying from mall to mall, multitasking, directing eight to twelve employees, working ten hours a day and getting everything done. The more I personally worked the more the profit, as my two stores on Saint Thomas demonstrated.
The few times in those three years I only had one store going, I only had one helper, doing seventy percent of the work myself. It was less headaches too. The first phrase I learned in Spanish, when I hired locals to work for me was: ‘sacca lo’, ‘take it down’, as they did such sloppy work putting up conduit. But I was more amazed to find that they couldn’t even perceive when a pipe was horribly crooked and off level.
I’d ask one of my early employee's if he saw anything wrong. He’d stare at it for a minute and say “no”. I’d put my level on it and show him the bubble was as far to one side as it could go. I had to teach them ‘level’, neatness, uniformity and finally the beauty of economy in wiring, going from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ by the most direct, logical path, and the money that it saved. I taught many of them these common sense ways, all my tricks to bend pipe and pull wire. When they saw these short-cuts and the results, the efficiency, it struck them like an epiphany. They became far better, more thoughtful tradesmen. I never figured, when I moved there and first employed them, I was starting with first-graders. Only one Puerto Rican, Caesar, I had little to teach. But he’d spent ten years at electrical work in the States, from New York to California. He was so in love with electrical knowledge that I happened to show him my one-thousand page Canadian Electrical code book and when I told him I had two, he stole it and refused to give it back. I docked him a hundred dollars next paycheck and we left it at that, both happy.
By the time I left the island there were a dozen local electricians up to American standards, able to run jobs and teach their men what I’d taught them. They slowly took over my contracts by underbidding me. The American supervisors who came down regularly saw me teaching them, saw their increasing competence and their standards improve and were happy with that caliber, even more so when some of them, my best students, would bid the same electrical jobs at twenty or thirty percent lower than I did. They were delighted to earn four hundred dollars a week and bumped all their workers back down to minimum wage.
Such is life. I trained my replacements and myself right out of a job. But I don’t regret it. I was glad to leave the island when I did, glad I had to, for economic reasons, and glad I helped them, as they were truly good fellows and friends, worth teaching. The second phrase I learned, the first month there, was: ‘una cerveza muy frio, per favor’, which means: ‘give me a very cold beer, right away’. This was usually around lunchtime. But in the noontime heat, sweating profusely, the effects of one or two beers was completely gone within the hour.
Now, I'll proceed to tell you the story of Madeline, our secretary, in the next post, which I'll include today. For all the loss of well-deserved profits I went through with 'New Vision Construction', just the sight of her and our close acquaintance for over two years made it almost worthwhile. She was so rare, so special, no thinking being like myself would ever dare touch her, and I didn't. The payoff was all in the sight of her, the proximity, sharing a few words, her angelic presence, and then a rare smile from her, indicating that she liked you.
