An ESFP man answers whatever is in front of him and keeps no running total, so twenty years of being handed the worst of everything arrives as twenty years of separate, survivable nights. An organisation corrects what is brought to it as a claim, and a claim is made out of a tally and an ask.
Chick Sarver came up the shoulder a little after two on the county job and told me to shut the plant down. Nothing was wrong with the mat.
I was on the radio with the plant already. I said we had six more loads coming.
“Send them somewhere. Or dump them.” He had his hood back and his hair was wet. “Deshawn’s shaking.”
I said it was fifty-one degrees out.
“He’s not cold,” Chick said. “He’s been on the rake since six and he hasn’t eaten since he came on and he’s not going to tell you that, and if he goes down in front of that screed we’re going to have a real night.”
We shut it down. It cost the company about nine thousand dollars in wasted mix and a day of schedule, and Wick Trumbo asked me for two weeks afterward what had actually happened, and what I wrote in the daily was shut down for weather, and it had not rained.
Chick started at Rufener in 1997 as a laborer. He was twenty-one, out of a year at the community college and a stretch of nothing much. He is a big, slow-walking, extremely loud man who knows the first name of every flagger, every plant loader operator, and every state inspector in three counties, and their kids, and in about a third of the cases their kids’ sports. He does not carry a clipboard. He has never once in twenty-nine years sent a text message with a full sentence in it. He sings, badly, on the radio, and two general superintendents have told him to stop and he has apologised warmly to both of them and continued.
Rufener Paving works from the thaw to the freeze on state and county resurfacing, some commercial lots, and a plant we own a third of. Lenny Rufener is second generation and I have no quarrel with him. We run four paving crews at the peak and two in a soft year, and everything anybody in this company will ever earn is decided between the middle of a season and the last night of it.
Nine crews’ worth of men come through this yard in a year and about half of them are gone by the freeze, and the ones who remain do so for a reason, and this industry spends a great deal of money every winter trying to work out what the reason is.
A season here runs from about the time the plant can hold temperature to about the time it can’t, and everything that happens inside it is compressed. You bid in the winter, you hire in the spring, you run out of hours in the middle, and by the back end you are staffing off whoever is upright. There is a night in the autumn when the last truck dumps and somebody hits the horn on the paver, and that is the whole ceremony this industry has.
I came here in 1999 to answer phones and dispatch trucks. I have been operations manager since 2013. Twenty-seven years of building the board, all told.
Here is the sentence this company has used about Chick Sarver for two decades. It is not unkind. Everybody who says it likes him, and it has been said about him in my hearing perhaps four hundred times, and I have said it more than anybody.
Give it to Chick. He never minds.
Twenty-nine years. He has run every kind of work this company does and in all that time he has not been the foreman on an interstate job, which are the money jobs, because the interstate jobs go to Tommy Voit, who asked for them in 2010 and has had them since.
The last board of the season goes up next week. The state job at the interchange has a night closure on it that nobody wants, and the crew for it is not assigned yet, and it is sitting on my desk right now with a blank in it, and I have been looking at that blank for two days.
Lenny’s father had a line about him that Lenny still uses.
“That man never had a bad day in his life.”
The Board
The board is a whiteboard hanging by the dispatch window, four columns and a row for every crew, and it gets built the night before and photographed and wiped.
That is the whole management system of a paving company. Who goes where, with what equipment, and who is on nights. Everything else — the schedule, the bid, the certified payroll, the state’s inspection reports — is downstream of a decision somebody made standing at a whiteboard with a marker at half past four in the afternoon.
Nobody reads a board backward. You cannot. It is gone the next morning.
Except that we photograph it, and we have photographed it since 2007, because a lawyer told Lenny’s father to after a dispute on a bridge job, and because certified payroll on public work has to show who worked what classification and when, and between those two things this company has a complete record of every assignment it has made for nineteen years, in boxes and on a server, and nobody has ever looked at it as anything except an answer to a subpoena.
My husband and I have been to forty-one state capitols. Not the states — the capitol buildings. We started in 2004 and neither of us can now reconstruct why, and we have nine left and two of them are difficult, and my sister thinks it is the stupidest thing she has ever heard of, and she is right, and we are going to finish it.
Two in the Morning
What Chick has is not kindness, and calling it kindness is how this company spent twenty years declining to look at it.
It is that he sees what is actually in front of him, at a resolution nobody else on that job is operating at. Not a general awareness that men get tired. He sees this man, at this hour, and knows he hasn’t eaten, and that his hands are shaking for the reason hands shake, and that he will not say so, and that in about forty minutes he will be somewhere near a moving screed.
I have tested it, privately, without telling anybody, being, as established, a person who counts capitol buildings. In 2021 I started writing down, on the days I was on a job, what Chick said about the crew before anybody else noticed anything. Nine notes over two seasons. Seven of the nine turned into something inside a week — a quit, a divorce, a guy who needed his hours changed, a kid in trouble.
Deshawn Pitts came to us in 2020 at nineteen and was the worst hire we made that year for about five months.
I heard the two of them behind the truck one night when neither of them knew I was there.
“You eat?”
“I’m all right.”
“That’s not the question.”
Deshawn said something I didn’t catch.
“Okay,” Chick said. “So here’s the deal. There’s a sandwich on my seat and if you don’t take it I’m going to eat it, and I’ve already had two, and my wife has opinions.”
Deshawn runs a screed now. He is twenty-five and he has an apprenticeship card and a truck payment and he did not have any of that in 2020, and every step of it came out of somebody’s attention on a night shift, and there is no field anywhere in this company’s systems where that shows up.
The other thing, and this is the part the office never sees, is that a crew he runs does not have arguments.
A paving crew is nine or ten men working three feet from a machine, at night, with trucks backing in, and everybody is tired and somebody is always wrong about something. Two of our four crews have a grievance a season. Chick has had one in twenty-one years and it was filed against the company and not against him and he testified for the man.
I asked him once what he does about it.
“About what?”
I said arguments.
He thought about it as though I had asked him about a thing that happens to other people, and then he said, “You feed them and you don’t let anybody stand around.”
That is not a management philosophy and it is also, as far as I can tell from twenty-seven years of grievance files, correct.
Dovie Hanks has been in the office since 2011 and does a version of this with every crew that comes through the yard, on the phone, all day, and what gets said about Dovie is that she is a sweetheart. Nobody has ever built a crew around Dovie. Nobody has ever put a night job on the board and said Dovie won’t mind, and the reason matters: they would not dare, and their not daring is not a courtesy. What that same yes costs a woman on this payroll, and how much sooner it costs it, belongs to a different page and a different count.
Dovie asked me in 2018 whether she could go out on a crew for a season.
I said she’d take a pay cut and lose her seniority in the office.
“I know what it costs,” she said. “I’m asking if I can.”
I told her I’d look into it and I did not look into it.
Give It to Chick
The night rotation is supposed to be a rotation.
State work with a lane closure gets paved at night, and night work is time and a half and it is also nine weeks of not seeing anybody and sleeping in the daylight and eating out of a cooler. Every crew is supposed to take a turn. It is in the handbook Lenny’s father wrote in 1988.
The way it actually works is that at half past four in the afternoon somebody has to fill a blank, and there are three foremen who will make a face, and one who will say yes.
Tommy Voit will not do more than one night stretch a season and everybody knows it. In 2016 he was put on a second one and he went to Lenny and said he’d take a job with Delp Brothers if it stood, and it did not stand, and I moved it, and I moved it onto Chick.
I did not experience that as a decision. That is the part I need to put down properly. At half past four with a marker in my hand it was the easiest of the available moves and it made the rest of the board work, and I did it in about nine seconds, and I have done a version of it every season since 2005.
He always said yes the same way. Not martyred. Not cheerful in the way that makes you feel bad. He would look at the board a second and then start improving it.
“That’s fine. Put Rusty with me, he’s better at nights than the kid.”
I said the kid needed the hours.
“Then give him days on the county and I’ll take him in the spring.”
So the worst assignment on the board went to the one man who took it, and on his way through he fixed two other things for two other people, in about nine seconds, standing up.
Nine Days
In the spring of 2019 Chick came to the office and asked for nine days off, mid-season.
His daughter was getting married two states away. There was a rehearsal and a wedding and a couple of days around it and his wife’s family was flying in.
He did not ask me. He filled out the form, which almost nobody does, and put it in the tray, and it came to me because everything comes to me.
Our policy, which is written down and which Lenny’s father wrote, is that field supervision does not take vacation between the start of paving and the end of it, absent a death in the immediate family. There is a good reason for it. A season is fourteen weeks of real money and a foreman off a crew for nine days in the middle of it is a crew that either sits or gets run by somebody who has never run one.
I took it to Lenny in his office with the form in my hand.
“Nine days.”
I said it was his daughter.
Lenny turned his chair a little. “If I give him nine, Tommy wants nine.”
I said Tommy had taken two weeks in 2016.
“That was different,” Lenny said, and it was different, and the difference was that Tommy had a job offer in his pocket and Chick had a form. “Can he move it to the shutdown?”
I said I’d ask.
I told Chick in the yard, next to the water truck.
“I can’t get you the nine.”
He nodded for a bit. Then he said, “Can I have the two at the end? I can drive it in a night.”
I said I could get him the two.
“Okay,” he said, and then — here is the part — “Don’t tell Roselle I asked for nine. She’ll think I made a thing of it.”
He drove eleven hours, went to his daughter’s wedding, and was on a job at six the morning after they got back.
How Exceptions Get Made
I have now gone and looked at how that policy has actually been applied.
Between 2008 and 2024 it was waived five times.
Tommy Voit in 2016, for the two weeks. A grade foreman in 2012 whose son was playing in a tournament out of state, which Lenny approved personally. Two men in 2019 and 2021 who had offers in hand from other contractors and mentioned them. And Wick Trumbo in 2022, who is not field supervision, and to whom the policy does not apply, and who I have included because Lenny cited him to me as a reason it was fine.
Every one of those five had something in it that made the company nervous.
That is how an exception gets made at Rufener Paving and I would guess at most places. The rule bends toward the person who might otherwise leave, and it stands hardest against the person nobody has ever imagined leaving.
Nobody at this company has ever imagined Chick leaving. Nobody has ever had a single conversation about retaining him. I have sat in nine or ten meetings about retention in the trades and I have never once heard his name in one, and the reason his name never comes up is that he never gives anybody a reason to say it.
And then the part that is mine.
That autumn at the shutdown dinner, which is a real dinner with real steaks that this company does well, somebody at our table was talking about the wedding, and I said — to the table, warmly, and it got a laugh — that Chick had driven eleven hours each way and been back on a job at six the next morning because that’s Chick.
Roselle was at the table. She laughed at the flat tire the way you laugh at a story you have heard nine times because your husband is enjoying telling it.
Afterward, in the lot, she said one thing to me while he was talking to somebody by the trucks.
“Was there a reason he couldn’t have the week?”
I said it was a policy thing.
“Sure,” she said, and got in the truck.
I have replayed that. I turned a man being told no into an anecdote about his character. Right in front of him. And he laughed, and then he told the version with the flat tire in it, which is funnier than mine, and the table went to him and stayed with him, and I felt good about the whole evening.
The Tally
In the spring I went up to the mezzanine and got the boxes down.
I did not go up there for this. I was pulling assignment records for an apprenticeship filing, which is a real thing that had a deadline. And the boxes were in order because I put them in order, and once I had 2009 open in front of me I did the arithmetic that this company has never done and that I am the only person in it who could have done.
Between 2005 and 2025, Rufener ran two hundred and six night stretches of a week or more. Chick Sarver was the foreman on ninety-one of them.
There are four foremen.
I checked it twice, and then I built it out by season, and then I stopped. The ninety-one is not the number that got me. What got me is that across twenty seasons there is not one stretch where he had two in a row off.
I built it out another way after that, because once you start you cannot stop. Of the ninety-one, sixty-one were assigned by me. Nineteen by the general superintendent before me. Nine were volunteered for, which I know because there is a note on the board photograph in my own handwriting saying so.
He volunteered nine times.
He has never mentioned it. Not once, not sideways, not in a joke. And here is the thing I could not get past for about a week: I do not believe he knows. There is nothing in that man that keeps a running total. Every one of those nights was a night, and it was survivable, and there was a crew on it and somebody to feed, and then it was the next night.
Somebody was counting, though.
Roselle Sarver said something to me at the shutdown dinner two years ago that I put down at the time as a wife being a wife.
She said the girls used to have a name for the season.
I asked what it was.
“They called it the away,” she said.
Three Workbooks
The state contractors’ association runs a course for field leadership — ten evenings at the association hall, a binder, a certificate at the end. Our company started requiring it for the foreman track in 2010.
Chick had been a foreman for five years by then. He took it in 2011 anyway, because the memo said everybody, and nobody noticed the sequence.
Then he took it again in 2014 and again in 2018.
He did not fail. You cannot fail it. He went the second time because two of his laborers were signed up and one of them could not read well and did not want to say so, and he went the third time because Deshawn was going and Deshawn was nineteen.
All three of his binders are in his file, because we keep them for the apprenticeship reporting. In the 2011 one, the personality module page is filled in. In the other two he left that page blank and did every other page.
The 2011 page says ESFP.
The material worth having is at the back of the binder, past the exercise, where it explains that four letters stand for a running order — one habit doing the heavy work, a second that shapes what gets done with it, and two at the far end that a person only reaches by deciding to, slowly, and clumsily. Which of them lands where in his case gets worked out where the type has a page to itself, drawn from the sixteen that association binder was printing from.
The one doing the heavy work is the live present, at full resolution — and in his case what it is pointed at is people. Not the mat temperature and not the clock, though he is fine on both. The actual condition of the actual men in front of him, right now: who is limping, who has not eaten, who got a phone call at the gas station, who is three days from quitting. There is no intuition in any of it. He is looking at it, the way you look at weather.
What that reading meets is a settled private answer about what a person in that condition is owed. It arrives with the reading and it does not get weighed against anything. There is no calculation in it about the schedule or the mix or the nine thousand dollars, which is why I could not get an explanation out of him that night and why what I wrote in the daily was a lie.
The final two in the order are the ones a career is actually made of.
The first is running the external machinery: the tally, the memo, the ask, the file, the leverage — the whole apparatus that turns a contribution into a claim somebody has to answer. He has none of it. He filled out one form in twenty-nine years and when it came back no he asked for two days instead and worried that his wife would think he had made a thing of it.
The second is the long picture: where twenty seasons put a man, what a body is at fifty-five, what any of it adds to. He does not have that either. Every night was a night.
An organisation corrects what is brought to it as a claim. A claim needs a total and an ask, and both of those come out of the two things he has least of. So the correction never came, and everybody in this building read the absence of a correction as the absence of a problem, and he read it that way too, which is the part I cannot put anywhere.
I built the board, so this part is mine to say. Assignment records are records. Public work generates certified payrolls that show classification and hours by name and by week, and a written request for your own is a normal request that a lot of places are obliged to answer. And where a policy has been set aside for other people and not for you, put the question in writing — what the criteria are, not as an accusation but as a question with a date on it — and keep whatever comes back. Temperament is not what any of that is about. The people for it are your local, if you have one; an attorney, if you do not; and whoever this company has for complaints.
That binder says on its own front page that the questionnaire is for discussion and has no business in selecting or assigning anybody, and that if you hand it to the same person again a month on, close to a third come out somewhere else on it, while the measures it is built from stay put.
The exercise on the facing page asks the class to identify which style is best suited to leading a crew. There is an answer in the instructor’s guide. It is not his.
The Last Night
The interchange closure is nine nights and it is the last work of the season and somebody has to do it.
Two things gave out on me up in that mezzanine.
The county job in 2004, first. That story has been mine for twenty-two years: the night Chick shut down a plant over a kid being tired. I have used it warmly, and also, quietly, as evidence about a man who does not think about money. What was actually happening on that shoulder is that a foreman had read a nineteen-year-old correctly in the middle of a night shift and made a call that cost his employer nine thousand dollars and cost him nothing he could name, and then let a supervisor write weather in the daily rather than make anybody defend it. I have had the true version in my own handwriting the whole time.
Then the water truck in 2019, and don’t tell Roselle I asked for nine. For seven years that has sat in my head as a modest man being modest. It is not modesty. He had been told no by a policy that has bent five times for people who might leave, and the only thing left in him afterward was making sure nobody at home thought he had made a fuss, because the fuss is the part he considers the failure.
What the binder had no space for. He has a court date every few years about the same thing, which is speed, and tells it at the yard as a joke that nobody in his house finds funny; there is a brother he stopped speaking to in 2013 and nobody here knows the reason; and he is, about exactly one subject, capable of a flat meanness — a grade foreman who was let go in 2015 for something Chick will not describe, and whose name he will not say, and who I have heard him refuse to discuss twice.
Deshawn asked me last week whether the interchange job was going to be Chick’s.
I said I hadn’t built it yet.
“He’ll take it,” Deshawn said. There was nothing sly in it. He was telling me a fact about the world, the way you say it’s going to be cold.
I said I know.
I called Tommy Voit yesterday and asked him, straight, whether he’d take the interchange.
He wanted to know how many nights.
I said nine.
He gave me the pause I have been hearing on that line for twenty years, and then he said he’d have to look at some things, and asked me when I needed to know.
The board goes up on the fifteenth and the marker is on the ledge where it always is.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.