I went into construction welding naive as fuck, thinking, you weld, you get paid on Friday, it's all good. The bigger the place you work for the the higher the pay, the more intense the politics is. I started off even before this NASSCO job when I worked on water tanks and in refineries to bring water and supplies to my coworkers. My example I started getting crews to be more caring to each other and support each other. Not everyone was on board with this or responded in a way that was useful but enough realized what I was doing and started doing the same thing. Just little things like this can make a group of squabbling crewmates into a more cohesive unit. For instance, on one refinery job where we did our daily paperwork before going into the tank we were using pens from the supervisor's desk. Most of the pens were nonfunctional, or just skipped half the time so we'd end up sharing one good pen. A few mornings of this and it just struck me how insane this was to have high paid guys sitting around for half an hour waiting to use a one dollar pen. I stopped by Walmart and picked up a couple pouches of decent pens for a few bucks. Came in next morning and handed two pens to each coworker and set aside the rest as spares. Asshole supervisor figured out what I'd done and instead of just quietly thanking me or maybe giving a pep talk and using my example to encourage people to work together, he spent ten minutes berating the crew because I "had to go get you all pens". No, no, no. That wasn't the message I wanted to hear him say. It's like I do the crew a favor and show them how a bit of thinking ahead can save hundreds of dollars, etc, and they get berated for not thinking of this themselves. Never mind the fact that the supervisor could have, and should have taken care of this small issue himself. Maybe he should have saved this bitching for the mirror. Anyway, I finally got tired of the supervisor and his foreman and their assholery and told them all off one morning in front of the entire crew. Just ripped them up one side and down the other and refused to be shut up. Then told the foreman to take me to the gate as I was totally done with their shit. It was EPIC. No one's ever done this before and I wanted it to be a lesson in sticking up to the man. The foreman was so pissed he was red in the face but couldn't do shit as I had officially quit in front of God and Everyone on the crew. So he gets in the truck with me and I'm still not done with him but I'll let him start it up again, which he promptly does. I was ready. I reminded him how after doing a bang up job welding out a section of the tank and finished all the work he had assigned me he drives up and bitches me out for standing there drinking water. "WTF is that all about? WTF were you thinking?" I tell him. He responds, "Oh man, I say that stuff to everyone!". Like it's just normal behavior. I scream back at him, "That's exactly what I'm talking about. You treat everyone like shit!". Then the fucker totally loses it. Now, this guy is well over six feet and built like a tank. Mostly muscle but not much brain and certainly no culture what so ever but there's rules even he is not stupid enough to break. You absolutely can not, ever, engage in physical violence in a refinery. To do so would get your TWIC card cancelled for life and as well cost the contractor the project. Contract would be cancelled that very day if there's so much as a mark on me. We both know this. So, foreman is just seething with rage now and can't deal with it. I'm at least six inches shorter than him and ten years older and he can't do shit. He splutters, hops out and yells out the lead man to drive me out. LOL. A month later I get a letter from an attorney asking me to join in a class action lawsuit against the contractor. Nah. I'm good. The entire rest of the crew went and got an attorney to sue the fuck out of the contractor. LOL. Really, it only takes one guy to make shit happen but timing is everything.