The theme for this chapter will be that all-important law for Professional Engineers: employers are required to give us the time, equipment, and support (workers – draftsmen, designers) required to do the job assigned to us.
If you’re to be responsible for “the public health” as P.E.s are, then all your energy should be on the engineering design. Your employer must give you all the tools you need to complete that critical job – AND – the time to do it.
My first project at Jasmine Engineering, Inc. was a TB clinic for the City of Austin. Tuberculosis. Very tricky. You have to orchestrate the air supply so that the TB patient areas do not contaminate the public or other areas. (Just like with the whole Covid situation, isolating Covid wards from the main HVAC air supply system.)
Starting to work on this interesting project, I suddenly realized that (1) their CAD computer was slow as a turtle and worthless, (2) the help was named Skipper and he had never set foot in an engineering office before, and (3) there was nobody else! No secretary to answer the phone or do the typing. Just Jasmine’s assistant, Coy Ballard, who was the “office manager” (gay, landscape architect, basically a pencil pusher).
Jasmine was a P.E. in mechanical but never did any design work or any other kind of work other than snag one City or State contract after another, touting her woman-owned, minority business credentials. Coy whipped out the contracts like a Wild West gunslinger.
Apparently, my resume opened all doors. And, believe you me, Coy and Jasmine knocked on them all, with total disregard for my ability to complete the work as promised to the client.
About Coy. Competent as an office manager. Not a bad person. Buy gay, flaming gay. Flamboyant gay. I mean, look at this guy, I’d say to myself at the time. That’s not being feminine or effeminate. (Mom would say “prissy.”) My sisters were nothing like that when I was growing up. No girl I’ve ever dated or worked with, either.
What. Is. Going. On. Here? Well, Mr. Bill just met his first uber-gay individual, peacock feathers and all.
Personally? I think these poor people and the whole LGBTQA+26 spectrum (here we go, insulting half the universe with my shotgun analysis) have been brainwashed by advertising. Why spend $350,000 raising a child – the going rate unless you’re a Black mother, 85% of whom are single and depend on $20,000 of government largess each year to raise your family of 4 (talk about systemic racism – only $20K???) – when you can spend that $350k per child, on – well material goods. Egoism!
How come nobody’s trying to put Black fathers in the home to raise their kids??? Single mothers everywhere need a man in the house. Their kids have a FAR greater chance of being one of those LGBTQA+26 crowd, when absent the nuclear family as a unit.
Doh! Wall Street, therefore, loves – absolutely LOVES – breaking up families like that. Easy money!
Otherwise, I’ve now met my first homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual (Coy, Connie, and Connie’s roommate). All three ended up miserably. The only good thing to come out of all that is that very soon (after the summer from Hell at Jasmine Inc.) I can be prejudiced as much as I damn well please. I already had a free pass, being schizophrenic; but – “Do unto others as they do unto you.” I can live by that principle, too.
Don’t those people know anything about optics? All the Blacks I have ever met – yes, and dated – have been upright and decent. My drill sergeant in the Army and at Annapolis; my roommate Miguel, Plebe Summer – Jimmy and Benny, building Pop’s house.
Hello, me Black you White. Back at you, ‘bro.
Everybody is green in the Army, they used to say. That’s been my perception – and ambition – my whole adult life. But these guys. We’re purple. Pink. We LOVE colors that clash. We absolutely adore clashing. How else are we going to groom the next generation?
I’m sorry. You people done clashed the wrong guy this time. And, if you hadn’t noticed, I. Do. Not. Forget. Anything.
Otherwise. I’m telling you this a little ahead of when the actual feelings transpired, reference gays. Why put the cart before the horse? Because you need to read the “subtext” in my Jasmine story. Sure, she’s the owner and the Big Boss. But she’s hardly ever there (her main office is in downtown San Antonio; the Austin office is a new office, hardly more than an experiment). Coy Ballard is in Austin all the time. He. Runs. The. Show. In Austin.
So, all these bad things building up steam over the following pages? I write as if it’s Jasmin’s fault. That’s not true. It’s Coy Ballard pulling the strings – and the noose! – tight.
Why homosexuals DESPISE schizophrenics is a mystery to me. I suspect they realize that gays, like psychic vampires, LOVE to “turn” nice guys like me, unassertive, courteous – but something BREAKS in your brain when you resist. That something that BREAKS leaves you schizophrenic.
But watch: Watch how Coy uses STRESS to knock down my defenses. Then, when I persist, more STRESS. And more. . . Standard MO when gays have their next victim in sight.
Only a theory.
I got my computer friend Steve Weitz out in Cedar Park to stop by and tune up Jasmine’s pathetic CAD computer (even with all his best programs, the turtle still couldn’t cross the road.). Jasmin got really pissed off and didn’t want to pay Mr. Weitz.
So, I brought my own PC into the office. Skipper was a decent guy and sharp. I showed him how to operate my engineering design programs (which suddenly worked to perfection), and got him doing lighting calculations. I did all the design and CAD work myself.
Our “office” was an open retail space at the bottom of an office building on Congress Avenue. A couple of tables. The computers. That’s it. Just me and Skipper all day (he worked 8 hours. I worked 12+ and with a 90-minute commute to and from Lago Vista each way PLUS a 20-minute walk each way from public parking ten blocks away under the Interstate).
Jasmine just parked on the street outside. She must have gotten dozens of parking tickets that summer. Probably paid parking fines worth more than she paid me (which I later calculated to $5/hour including overtime.)
I never got the health insurance she’d promised in my interview. Never had a day off (including weekends). Never even had a chance for my regular Saturday morning tennis with Mom out in Lago, much any dinners at her house when my sisters or brother came by.
Skipper quit real soon, after which time I did everything myself. Jasmine hired a draftsman after a couple of weeks. He was a Navy veteran. Nice enough guy. I thought he was a slacker, but that’s only because he was forced to work on an incredibly slow CAD computer.
Put the best Formula One driver on a tricycle and he’s still just on three wheels. Jasmine never did buy him a new computer. I don’t even know why he kept working for us.
After a month in the office space, we moved up to nice offices upstairs. I had a private office. I brought all my design books from the house. There was a drafting board where I could review and mark up drawings. I had my own PC and monitor and printer – still my own tech – (and software, my suite of engineering design programs), and maintained a very heavy workload.
In addition to marking up drawings and supervising the draftsman, I also went with Jasmine and Coy to any number of interviews for new work.
They were REALLY nice jobs. BIG jobs. Jobs I’d never, ever have gotten out on my own. (Think: women and minority set-aside jobs from the State of Texas and the feds. These days they call it “systemic discrimination” and demand more.) But we had a good system going, and the work was going out the door.
I was working 16-hour days, 7 days a week, but the expectation was for that to even out at some point. I asked for faster computers. Another draftsman. A designer. I needed all three desperately. Jasmine refused.
Remember the PE Rules? She’s required to provide me with all the time (at the rate of 8 hours a day), equipment (state-of-the-art computers or at least reasonably fast ones), and personnel (secretary, designer, draftsman) necessary for me to do the work assigned to me.
Did NOT happen. ANY of it.
I seemed like Jasmine spent all her time interviewing secretaries. Dozens of them! When she finally hired somebody, they never lasted very long.
Jasmine could have helped with the workload. She did HVAC and rudimentary electrical design skills. But no, she and Coy seemed oblivious to the excruciating hours I was working. When they arrived in the AM, I’d already put in a day’s work.
After they left, I put in another days work before I drove back home to Lago.
Well, you asked for it, Mr. Bill. You wanted to run the show. Do big projects. Be a principal (or at least act like one). So, I sucked it in and did what I had to do.
It’s a new operation, a new office, and we’re building up a client list. I’m getting to know lots of new architects who teamed up with Jasmine Engineering on projects, and making a name for myself in the biz.
Then we interviewed with SECO, the State Energy Conservation Office, for a big project down in San Antonio. I knew the bosses at SECO, and we sailed through the interview. It was for an MHMR (Mental Health and Mental Retardation) campus with maybe ten large buildings to analyze and recommend ways to save energy. I told Jasmine we could handle the work. And we could have, if she’d hired some qualified people to help me.
I’d guess her fee for the job was maybe $350,000. My salary, by comparison, was $32,000 or about $2500 a month. By the time you add all my overtime, that was $5/hour, but that didn’t matter to me. We were building a brand. A business.
My point is this: $350k is a LOT of money. That much money means a LOT of work has to be done. Thousands of man-hours.
The design documents were due at the end of the summer. That’s in two months. We visit the site. They’re all very old buildings. The facility manager has blueprints for all the buildings, but the drawings are very old and a lot of modifications will be needed to update the blueprints. That means a walk-through of each building. Legwork. LOTS of legwork. AND the MHMR campus is down in San Antonio, which is a two-hour drive from Austin.
I tell Jasmine I need help. And SOON. I’m up to my gills in all these other projects and hardly have any time left over for this one.
She hires a civil engineering grad student from the University of Texas. Part time. He helps “taking off” building dimensions – walls, windows, to input into my energy analysis program. She wouldn’t buy a commercial, approved energy analysis program.
So, the grad student and I tabulated the data into my energy analysis program, the one I did for the SHEMP hospitals – which was approved by SECO, which is who we were working for on this project. So, it was logical to assume we could use it again.
Chatting with my grad student helper, who worked beside me in my office, I found out he’s here on a green card. Not authorized to work. I tell Jasmine.
“He’s working for free,” she says (after a VERY long pause). I say we need more help. Qualified help. This guy doesn’t know squat about energy conservation.
“He wants to learn.” But, Jasmine – we’re falling way behind.
She ignores me. Coy ignores me, too – ever the silent witness. I run into a friend doing a much smaller SECO project that summer – maybe two buildings, much more modern – and he’s worried about me. REAL worried.
“Come on, man. A dozen buildings? You haven’t even completed the site work yet? It’s killing you!”
So. Here we are. I can only spend a couple of hours a day doing engineering calculations on the MHMR project (out of 16 hours a day I was putting in). At one point I submitted a whole stack of projects to get typed up by our secretary. She lost everything! I had to do it all over again.
Hello? A $350,000 fee and Jasmine has essentially spent ZERO dollars of that – the grad student is working for free, and my hours are all outside my 8-hour day. Or on weekends. Four weeks left to go?
Jasmine and Coy seem flabbergasted that I am constantly begging for help. Qualified help. I have no idea what was going on in their heads.
Maybe they expected to make a $300,000 profit??
I submit what projects I could do (there were several small projects for each of ten buildings, lighting, HVAC, electrical). The review team checks them out. We go over for their comments. SOLID RED INK.
Jasmine and Coy are ticked off. Well, what the F did you expect?
Still no new help. No faster computer. No experienced secretary. What did they do?
They bring me over to a bank across the street and have a Notary Pubic authenticate my signature on a letter they wrote that says, “I overstated my qualifications. I accept that I will be locked out of the office except for the 9-5 workday. I accept a $10,000 reduction in pay to $24,000.” (Their draftsman was making more than that, MUCH more.)
So. I still had all that work. The deadline was coming. But now I had only eight hours a day. The same excruciatingly slow computer and draftsman. . . Finally, I convinced them to hire somebody else.
They hire Patricia House, with whom I’d worked at ORA on the SHEMP hospital audits (she’s the P.E. who showed my mathematical model of the nomographs to SECO, presumably claiming the work as her own). I get them to hire two more people, Larry Werner, a plumbing/mechanical designer with 20+ years of experience, and another designer with 20+ years of experience.
Then I pack up my books and – leave. “Life’s too short,” Dr. Parra told me the week before.
My last sight was those three people plus Coy and Jasmine at the conference table pouring over the blueprints. Something that should have happened two months previously. I’d guess it took them a couple of weeks to finish what I had started – and Jasmine still made a $100,000 profit on the thing.
Okay, so it was bad experience. I let it go.
They didn’t.
Again – instead of focusing on getting the goddamn MHMR project out the door – Coy and Jasmine filed a grievance with the P.E. Board – TWO of them. Mr. Clark absconded with some of our books and documents when he left (not true, and I proved it easily, because they HAD no books or documents!)
Mr. Clark ran off with a bootleg copy of our AUTOCAD computer drafting software and even used it to design a project on the side. (This was the early Wild West days of computers. The EXCEPTION was people who actually had licenses to their computer tech.)
Well, yeah – I loaded their AUTOCAD on my own computer (with their permission; actually their INSISTANCE) because the company didn’t give me a computer to work on.
And no, I did do one project on the side when I was with Jasmine (one day’s work for which I got paid more than she paid me for my entire time working there), but I happen to have my own personal CAD license from when I was doing projects as Ark Associates.
I was cleared by the Board on both charges.
NOTE: At this time I presented a grievance of my own to the P.E. Board. All my time sheets, showing I worked 16-hour work days non-stop for three months, averaging $5/hour. That I had no decent computer to work on. No qualified help. No secretary.
None of the things the RULE said I should get. The PE Board didn’t do a damn thing. Not even forward the grievance to Jasmine like they did Coy’s bitching to me.
In fact, the PE Board sicked AUTOCAD on me!
At one point defending myself with AUTOCAD I said, “You people should fu*king talk to ORA. They only have one copy of AUTOCAD and twenty people have been using it for five years.”
They did check with ORA. Fined them a bundle I’m sure, half a million dollars maybe. Offered me a free copy of AUTOCAD. I told them to go to Hell.
All this in just three months. The summer from Hell.
Aside from all the drama, what bothered me most is that the P.E. Board didn’t have my back. Not even close. Those guys can do more than suspend a license. They can award hard time in jail. There are no appeals. You can have an attorney, sure, but engineers are your jury. Their engineers. And, clearly – correct me if I’m wrong – I’m batting zero for ten in with engineers.
Which reminds me. Somewhere in there, I interviewed with Green Engineering. Tom Green told me in the interview that all the engineering firms in Austin get together each year to discuss the salaries they pay their people. Ummm. Free enterprise? Competition?
Racketeering!
I know, it’s disappointing. Engineers have such a great reputation, don’t we? In fact, effing engineers belong right down there with lawyers, politicians, and the National Enquirer (huh. I bet they’d publish that ADD article…).
If you’re thinking all this grief wasn’t circumstantial, I’m with you. The same ADD/IAQ drama that got ORA so ticked off? I may be paranoid and schizophrenic but I do know how to fend off those kinds of thoughts. But – I mean, wow. What just happened? How could they possibly get away with sh*t like that?
But, still. . . Maybe this will make you think it’s more than a conspiracy theory:
I was on that psychology board all this time, remember? We had our first meeting. Somehow, I got permission from Jasmine to go. (Maybe I said it was a doctor’s appointment with the VA. “Going to see the psychiatrists. Adios!”).
I brought the article on the IAQ/ADD theory to the meeting. Presented it to the Board. Their legal counsel refused to let them consider it. Hello? ADD? Air quality. School psychologists?!
I resigned from the PAAC Board on the spot.
Back to the real world. I hustled around and worked out of the house. Got odd jobs with architects I’d worked with at ORA. Met a few new architects in all that Jasmine crapola. Jobs with Comfort Mechanical.
Another engineer friend threw some work my way on a big computer fab facility going up in town. Referrals led to more work. A church in a strip mall. A nail salon in one of the shopping malls. A garden center in South Austin.
Zooming around town in my little Geo Metro.
I work very fast. Always get the job done on time. Courteous to a fault. Folks liked my work. Never had any problems with the designs. (One project I did for Paul Tutt at AISD was a mirror image – we laughed about that. See how much stress I’ve been under?!)
It was hard for me to get paid for my work, though. I got my little brother (who is actually a good bit taller than I am, by the way) John to help out – journalists are TOUGH – I gave him a percentage. He got them to pay up right away. Thanks, bro.
Lago Vista is an hour’s drive from Austin where all my projects were. That drive got to be a little tedious. A friend of mine Larry said The Delphi Group needed a P.E. I interviewed with them. Larry worked for them as a draftsman/designer.
Ron Gauny was the big boss. Mark Randolph was the CFO and #2. I took the job. Part time. I could drive into Cedar Park and take the express bus, clear across to the south side of town where their offices were. Finally. Peace on earth and good will to all men and women.
I brought all my outstanding jobs to their office, and we finished them there. That was our deal: They got the fees. I didn’t care for the money. I just wanted the work. A quiet, dependable job working as a P.E. That I got. They were very good people. My immediate boss was Eddie Bloomquist. Great fellow; quite rotund. Eddie knew everybody in the biz. I mean. Every. Body.
Eddie even gave me permission to take a class at the University. It was a new beginning. Thanks Ron. Thanks Mark.
Larry may not know this, but one of the drawings I gave him to do was the old Solar System model from the infamous NASA research.
Yeah, we’re going back to THAT now.
You best strap on your crash helmet, girls. Because Mr. Bill has been toughened up a good bit by all those evil engineers. I got wheels now. A house to stay in. It’s high time I got back on mission.
Let’s do this.