One night, Rodney Cole, age 71, was going about his custodial duties at Coast Hospital, Fort Bragg, when he felt someone watching him. He looked around and saw his idle workmate, a young man of 18.
“I asked him what he was doing,” Rodney recalls. “He says to me, ‘I’m making sure you're working, and you better learn to hurry up. If you don't work faster you're not going to make it here.’ He's giving me orders like I was the boy and he was the man.”
Rodney Cole has been employed all his long life, but like millions of American seniors Rodney's retirement income is not enough to pay all his bills. He doesn't complain about having to work. “I like to work,” he says, and laughs that people often say to him, “You look great. You can't be that old.”
A retired electrical contractor, Rodney, who bears a faint resemblance to Charlie Chaplin and sees the humor in situations that might infuriate most of us, says he had “no problem” with janitorial work and enjoys the irony of his work history. “I wired three hospitals in Los Angeles. And I've been on both sides of the fence. I've been an employer and an employee. I know what it's like at both ends.”
Rodney and his wife have been managing trailer parks to make ends meet since his retirement. They came to Fort Bragg from Clearlake. When Rodney heard about possible work for seniors at Coast Hospital, he hustled down to apply and, after what he says were several weeks of rigmarole, he was hired as a probationary night shift custodian by Joan Dias of Housekeeping. “Call me if you have any problems,” she said, “and she gave me her card with her home phone number on it.”
The employee roster identified him as Raymond not Rodney, a mistake Rodney chuckles at, adding, “I always try to laugh, lighten things up with laughter. Everything was fine while I was working with that first lady; she was smart, cordial, helpful. But then they changed her hours and they put me with this kid. He was rude to me right off the bat, like he was my supervisor, but he wasn't my supervisor and even supervisors, the good ones anyway, aren't rude.”
Rodney says he kept his mouth shut “but it kept getting worse. I was always on time, did everything I was asked to do. I don't work real fast but I work steady. I get everything done. But this kid was on me all the time.”
One shift the kid jumped on the old man with both feet. Rodney had been on the job a month and a half, three paychecks at about $14 an hour. “I even had my badge with my picture and my right name on it.”
Rodney remembers the 18-year-old demanding, “Where you been? Did you put the blue sheets on?” I told him, I sure tried, but they're too short. You're telling me to do something that won't work.”
That exchange occurred in front of several persons, including the kid's father. The kid tried to throw his weight around but got it thrown right back in his face.
Back in the custodian's office, the kid got in Rodney's face.
“Don't you ever belittle me in front of people like that ever again. I gave you a direct order to do something and you failed to do it. When I tell you to do something you better do it. I'm your teacher.”
Rodney told the boy, “You're not my teacher and your attitude is wrong. Back off. You've crossed the line. I've done everything I've been shown to do, and I'm not going to be treated this way.”
The embattled custodian remembered that the boss, Joan Dias, had invited him to call if “he had a problem.”
Rodney had a problem. He called Joan Dias.
“She was not happy to hear from me. She told me I had to get along. I agreed, but I told her I'm not working with him. I'll work with anybody else.”
Rodney worked the next day, a Monday, without incident. A passing nurse joked, “Hey, Rod. I see you got rid of your baby-sitter!”
Joan Dias called Rod at home and told him to come in the next day, a Tuesday, for “a meeting.” Rod was not scheduled to work that day. He was on his own time.
Dias told him to sit down, “looked at me with this stone face,” handed Rod his check and said, “You're not working out. That's it.”
He remembered another senior's warning. “They used me when they were short, let me go when a younger person came along.”
Rodney went up the Hospital's chain of command as per the employee manual.
“I was told to put it in writing and I'll get back to you. That was it.”
Ditto for his union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 588, 940 Hopper Avenue, Santa Rosa.
Although Rodney was a probationary employee who could be fired without explanation, and he wouldn't be represented by his union until he was full-time or three months into the job, the union immediately took a one hundred dollar initiation fee while explaining, “Your dues are based on your hourly rate of pay; at this time they are $45 per month…”
“I contacted the union,” Rodney says. “They advised me to make a report in as much detail as possible that I can remember. I made a copy and I sent it to Scott Kidd, the Hospital's chief personnel officer. I called Scott the first part of last week. I left word on his voice mail to call me back on what he had decided.”
The union sent back a barely legible, small print copy explaining why Rodney wouldn't be represented by them. He never heard from Kidd.
A friend told him he needed a lawyer.
“I can't afford a lawyer,” he says.
Coast Hospital is still billing him $138.96 for the pre-employment physical exam they required him to take.
ED NOTE: Anybody out there know what happened to Rodney? After I wrote this story I never heard from him again.
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