BOY...DID I GET A LOOK THE OTHER DAY

Yesterday I was walking to another job site to get some 3/4 inch flex with the journeyman on that job. Enroute, one of the regular employees(a painter) drove by in his van and I caught out of the corner of my eye a look so disdainful that he must have thought he was gazing upon a cat hairball horked up moments ago on his breakfast of spite and contempt. He is a petty bastard who has perfected his art via state employment for twenty plus years. If he wants to make small talk, I'm there. But truth be told, I could give a shit what he really thinks about me because regulars hold us contract guys in a sort of purgatory where they resent us for the money we make, smile and then talk shit behind our backs but when it comes down to to doing something they are not inclined to do for a variety of reasons, those pursed lips of comtempt miraculously become the pursed lips on our collective asses. In a word, it's lower level politicing. They resent us and take every opportunity to smear us. It's all bullshit of course and while it has some effect on the rest of the peons in regard to how we are recieved, the "higher ups" understand that we get the job done better than the regular troops, so on that level we are appreciated but frequently scapegoated by project managers who used to be carpenters or painters who lucked into positions beyond thier means and still resort to the kind of bullshit their peers they left behind resort to when the chips are down. When it's good it's good, when something goes wrong, try to figure out a way to blame the contractors. That's the nature of the beast.
So, back to the painter...He purports himself to be the best painter and mudman on the planet. He may have been twenty years ago, but today, in 2005, he sucks. I won't bore you with the details, but trust me, My dog Irene can paint a straighter line. And he talks shit about us, constantly. He tells lies about us, gossip, designed to keep the pot stirring. He looked at me that way the other day and I thought he must be looking in a mirror, instead of seeing a couple of guys trying to make a living, he was seeing twenty plus years of his own life down the toilet, going nowhere, and while we might very well be on a similar path it was a path he resented. It was clear. He has great disdain for us. Fuck him.
Today, that journeyman I was walking with caught the painter asleep in the middle of the day, in a room he should have been prepping. But instead he was snoozing away, this righteous pillar of quality worker...asleep. So sound asleep, that he didn't stir when the journeyman took several pictures of him with his new cell phone that has a camera built in. He even got a close up!
He'll be emailing those pictures to me tomorrow. I have a printer.Payback is a bitch, innit?
Imagine the painter finding 8 1/2 x 11 prints of him catching z's on the job in his mud bucket, under the wipers on his van...the possibilities are endless.
Ahh...politics.