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Froggy in the PotFebruary 02, 2008 Someone told me this story the other day. Maybe it's not a big deal, but I can't get it out of my mind. It happened on a construction site. With few exceptions, Vineyard construction sites are small. One house is being built, not a row of houses, or an apartment block, or an office building, or a mall. A new hospital is currently under construction on the same site as the old: that's a big construction site. Morgan Woods, the affordable housing project in Edgartown that opened last summer, was a big site. Toward the end of the 1990s, the funky old county airport was replaced what what looks like a big bloated bus station. That was a big construction site. In those years it seemed like every school on the island was either adding on or replacing itself: enrollment was up and everyone thought the upwardness was likely to continue. Then real estate prices, which were already in the stratosphere, headed for outer space and families with school-age children started leaving, or not coming. Now school enrollment is sliding downward. Mobile classrooms for overflow students have vanished from the schoolyards, and so have the hardhats. Anyway, this happened on a small site. One house is being built, for a guy who lives elsewhere most of the time. Everybody knows each other, friends drop by to see what's happening, half the dogs in the neighborhood are hanging out waiting for the dog-loving carpenter to pull a biscuit from his pocket. The owner wanted to monitor his house-to-be from afar, so he had a webcam set up on the site. The contractor was furious. According to the account I heard, he lost his temper seriously enough that his co-workers apologized for him, explaining that he'd been under a lot of pressure lately in his personal life. I said, Well, going ballistic usually isn't a good idea, but if someone put up surveillance equipment on my worksite without even mentioning it in advance, I might have a hard time minding my manners. This was not the reaction my informant expected, and that's the reason I can't get the story out of my mind: my informant thought that the contractor was being unreasonable, and that I would surely agree. No, I don't agree. I think that if the owner of the house-to-be was just dying to get up-to-the-moment construction pictures, it would have been common courtesy to run it by the contractor first. Most likely the contractor -- treated like a peer and not like a subhuman with no dignity worth respecting -- would have gone along, and been able to mention it to his employees before the camera went up. I said as much. I didn't add that I wondered whether the excuse-making co-workers really disapproved of their boss's behavior or maybe they were doing what dogs do in the face of superior power: going belly-up so the alpha dog won't go for your throat. In theory we may think we're as good as the alpha who's paying our wages, but in practice when our livelihood is threatened we react almost instantaneously to protect it. The owner-to-be, I hear, thinks the contractor should just "suck it up." Phone calls are monitored, luggage is X-rayed or searched, your location can be pinpointed when you use your cell phone -- for your own protection, of course. Get used to it, get over it; if you protest, what are you trying to hide? Of course I'm thinking about the froggy in the pot who doesn't notice the increasing temperature of the water until he's too stunned by the heat to jump out. But a few days after I heard the story, it occurred to me that maybe the teller wasn't entirely comfortable with it either; otherwise why tell me? I'm not comfortable with it, and that's why I'm telling you.
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