Nothing particularly new in this one. Just my take on "We have to talk."
If you want something realistic, hit the back button hard. Actually you are on the wrong website if you want a realistic story. My story never happened. I hope you enjoy the ride as I enjoyed writing this one. Relax it's just a story and you are not paying to read this.
22K+ words. I divided it up into 3 clearly marked parts to make finding a spot to break easier. More good news is this is a self-contained story and you won't have to wait for the conclusion.
My Universe, My Rules. In my world, North Carolina divorces take 2 months instead of 12.
I recycle names. This has nothing to do with other stories unless specified.
Calling dibs = When someone says that they have dibs on something, they claim or declare rights to that thing before anyone else.
Yogi Bear was a US cartoon about a bear that could talk and schemed to steal picnic baskets in a park. Yogi said 'pickinick' (pick-eh-nick) rather than (pic-nic)
Three Stooges is a 1930s to 1960s comedy series that featured three men doing slapstick violence in their misadventures.
Shiner = black eye.
Oscar = award for good acting in film.
Kitchen sink = an American idiom meaning something has everything in it. 'Everything and the kitchen sink'.
I met my wife Brittany while I was attending community college. She was there for the first two years of a bachelors degree in management because going the first two years at community college was one way to save money over four years at a full university. Her plan afterward was to follow up with the last two years at the local branch of UNC. I was there for an associate degree in business so that I could run my father's electrical contracting business with enough basic business courses to not run it into the ground. My father wanted to retire early and his uncle had died childless.
My father was the sole heir and beneficiary of his deceased uncle. Two and a half million is not billionaire territory, but Dad wanted to go full-time in an RV at age fifty with my mom. He offered my brother a half share which he declined, but understand, there was not much to the business at that point. It was literally a man and a van who did local electrical work so there was no value to anyone not willing to actually be an electrician. My brother worked as an ironworker doing some of the larger buildings going up in North and South Carolina. He was a big guy with a big attitude and if you were patient, a big heart. He was my big brother who constantly gave me wedgies and Dutch Ovens... and beat the shit out of the much bigger bully who knocked me down and sat on me while beating me black and blue with a fraternity paddle he had found in the garbage.
As Brittany and I got more and more serious, we started talking about marriage. There was a prenup. Nothing all that controversial and very limited. She and her family only wanted to exclude her family trust, it was a few million, but I get it. I was in love and we are not talking about elite-level riches. In return, I got to exclude my business. Those were the only two items on the prenup and I was good. Family money. I get it, plus, each of our legacies stays with us no matter what happens in life.
Once I was a journeyman electrician and I had passed the state exam for a full license, I took over my father's one-man and a van electrical contractor company in May of 2012. I was twenty-two and a journeyman with the license and something my father had no idea about; knowledge of the internet. I put my business on Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram. I made a website and researched search engine optimization enough that I usually showed up in the first five results. Business took off nicely so that I was busy the vast majority of the time and it even became difficult to keep up on occasion.
By the time I turned twenty-six in 2016, I had seven employees besides myself. Three were in the office; Margaret, my office manager, Hank, my shop foreman and parts manager, and Amanda, my PA and bookkeeper. I have four electricians besides myself; Ed, Javier, his brother Manuel, and Mike.
We do residential and light commercial wiring, doing very well in those bids that the big guys ignore and the smallest ones cannot handle. I have a side business going in our warehouse where we sell and ship branded high-end quality electrical parts made in the US, UK, or EU. Not cheap, but the parts all have a small following. It adds a bit more than two million in sales volume to the company and helps even things out between jobs sometimes.
I have a rule in my business: The boss takes home zero before I cut anyone a dime. It has only happened once, and only for two weeks, but someone found out that I had taken home nothing that week and they had not had a cut and they told everyone else. Sometimes respect is more important to the long-term health of a company. No, I was not the one that told everyone what I had done. My turnover is zero, excepting Herb who retired at age sixty-seven last year. I picked him up at age sixty-six and you would have thought I had saved his dog from a house fire. I hired him even though he was upfront about only wanting to work until he reached full retirement age at sixty-seven. It was one of those times I had too much business and could use a hand. I hired him with the agreement that he would retire, not claim unemployment on me. It worked out for both of us and I made a friend.
My first hire for my company was Margaret, part-time in August of 2012. She wanted to work from nine to two to be home for her kids until her youngest was in high school. I was still a one-man shop, but keeping track of everything was getting to be a pain in my ass so I went onto Zip Recruiter and trolled the admin section and there I saw it. 'Local mom looking for four or five hours a day in an admin role. I'm a mom first! No nights and no weekends!' Other employers saw someone unwilling to work. I saw someone with values I liked. Family IS more important than work.
The email was a clear throwaway on Gmail, but I emailed her the details. The job was not all that hard and I did not have a lot to pay at the time as I was just starting to ramp up the business. I got a response and a real email address ten minutes later. Twenty minutes after that, I was on the phone with her. I got a great feeling from her. She was sweet, passionate, and bragged about her kids and her husband. Those are good values of a quality person.
It was after four when I asked to meet her at the food commons at the mall for an easy interview. She told me she had to get her kids then make dinner and her husband was away on business. I told her to bring her kids and I would pay for a pizza. I took her and her kids to a good pizza place in an actual storefront inside the mall rather than the cardboard crap in the food court. She was grateful... and employed as of the following Monday. We were a match. I could only pay ten bucks an hour, but she took it happily and I accepted her limited hours happily.
