The F-Word

They greet Bailey as they always do. High fives, hand shakes, nods of the head. They see her as one of them, which is good. The last thing you want on a construction job is some hot babe to distract everybody. Of course, you can’t say that, not in today’s litigious world, but everybody knows it. Burt put it best the time we’d hired a plumber who also happened to be a babe.

“Got a problem here, boss,” he said after she’d been with us a couple of months.

“Which is?” I asked.

I remember Burt looking around, making absolutely sure we were alone. Then he leaned in close enough for me to figure out he hadn’t really stopped smoking, the way he claimed.

“The new guy. I mean, the new girl.”

“Woman,” I said.

“Girl. Woman. The thing is, she’s gotta go.”

“She’s not working out? Her references were—”

“She’s a good plumber. She’s also female. The guys…”

“If they’re coming on to her, Burt, it’s your job to stop them.”

Burt shook his head. “That’s not the problem.”

“So what is the problem?”

“She drops a wrench, four guys rush over to pick it up. She starts to lift a box, they trip over each other running to help her. You know what I mean?”

I knew.

My crew was treating the lady plumber like a lady instead of like a plumber.

It was a serious problem. It took me a month to figure out how to ease her out of the job without laying the burden of it on her—and without anybody ending up in court. We did it by transferring her to another site where two of the crew were female and the odds of creating a problem were limited.

Bailey was with me the day we told the plumber we were moving her elsewhere. Afterwards, Burt yanked off his hardhat and swiped an imaginary layer of sweat off his forehead.

“Phew,” he said. “Glad that’s over. I know I ain’t supposed to say it, but women don’t belong on jobs with men. Oh, not you, Bailey,” he said hastily. “You’re never a problem.”

I recall thinking that as well meant as the comment was, it might be a little rough, but Bailey took it like the pro she is, just nodded and gave Burt a kind of quick smile as she stood there next to me, all but swallowed up in the coveralls she’d borrowed from Supplies.

She’s swallowed up in this current pair, too. She’s got the sleeves rolled up. The same for the cuffs. Still, the coveralls look huge on her. The boots, too.

Or maybe it’s that she looks small. No. Wrong word. She looks kind of, uh, kind of delicate.

She catches me staring at her.

“Something wrong?”

“Why didn’t you take a pair of coveralls that would fit you? “ I jerk my head at her ankles. I don’t know why, but I sound pissed off. “Those pants roll down, you could trip and fall.”

She looks down at herself, then up at me.

“You’re worried about accident reports,” she says briskly. “No need. I’m not about to trip. Or fall.”

“Still,” I say, “next time, requisition a size small.”

“This is a size small,” she says.

r /> Dammit, must logic always win?

And that’s the end of the conversation.