I DIDN'T WANT TO TELL THIS BACKWARDS

I already told it backwards on Facebutt, except for the analysis of work, ethics, and plumbing history. If I can't figure out a way to get the story right way around, it may be best to start reading from the first post. I also wanted to tell the story of my bathroom with pictures.

Before Schmidt began tiling, I suggested a way to lay tiles to make sure the horizontal line is level. He hadn't demonstrated that he had much more than a clue of how to do what he was attempting. He snapped back with a goofy grin, "there are at least five ways of doing something." To be sure, but there aren't five good ways level tile, and there usually aren't five good ways of doing almost anything. All work benefits from efficiences developed by experience and passed down through community with masters in the field. Schmidt's method of hammering 2 nails into the wall beneath a few unwieldy tiles to keep them from sliding down the wall certainly isn't one. The picture shows his technique for keeping tiles on the horizontal. You can see the nail in the lower left corner. The concept of laying tile out before laying it was totally beyond his ken.

Schmidt is known among his mates who did time with him at Scott County Jail while he waited to go to trial on charges of theft and forgery in 2007 as a big time partier who got high with the owner of a Bettendorf gym. Here he is in a photo by the Quad City Times from a story they did on him in 2005 after his departure from John Deere. My eye keeps traveling from the block in the lower right corner to Schmidt's fur-topped block of a head.

Schmidt looks like a stumpy, stupid David Letterman. Too goofy and too benign to swindle anybody. He came to my office to get his cash deposit to start work. That very day, the offices were full of police detectives who were there to return my brothers tile saws, which were stolen from my garage. The detectives found them at a pawn shop. Don Gano, the detective who trained those detectives, was also down in the hall pressing the flesh with his former chums. Schmidt had to thread his way through them to get to my office. He sat down and prattled on about some priest he remembered from fifteen years ago, and what the building my office is in was like when it was a library. Meaningless prattle intended to convince me that he really did attend St. Ambrose, something I had no reason to dispute.

This an enlargement of his face from the previous photo. It conveys kind of an impression of an affable goof--no brain trust to start with, but with a self-serving bent of mind that easily became deeply ingrained criminal behaviors. What happens to a failed college football hero with minimal academic skills and an overweening sense of male entitlement when life slaps him upside the head, and he can no longer skate on his deceitful charm? What happens when your co-workers are no longer willing to cover up for your incompetence? When your wife is no longer willing to pay for you to party with your cokey crowd of lowlifes? Well, Schmidt never realized any of this had happened to him. He carries on, even now, assuming a social, intellectual, and technological superiority, which in fact he could never have truly had.

Schmidt put some of his knowledge about business to work for him. He exploited the fact that the Quad Cities area still prides itself on being a place where people still do business on a handshake. He knew that it's a standard business practice to ask for a 50% deposit to start work, and to start a job from a basic, straightforward contract. He also knew that contracts are often ignored--at least by big business. Schmidt admixed his odd glimmers--observations about the vulnerabilities of doing business, an insight into how that can be contorted to exploit vulnerable people, experience with the persuasive power of self-structured publicity and how easy it is to create that, a sense of entitlement based in part, if no completely, on a masculine priviledge he felt entitled to, and an addiction to partying and drugs. Eventually, the only realm left in which he could feel the rush of being a male in this world was the drug/party world of illicit drugs and the kind of friends you get when you have access to them.

So, what is this story about? To start with, it's about the paucity of pleasure that comes from pursuing a practice that requires no ethical skill, mistaking yourself for someone with half a brain, and offending labors that you think are beneath you.