Note to Readers: The events described here occurred well before I knew I would spend my working career investigating and writing about white-collar crime. Perhaps these events played a subconscious role in my career arc. Personal names in this story have been changed to protect privacy. The photos are stock photos, not from my time on the job.
I will not forget my last summer job during my college years. Ever have to work a job that appeared to carry the risk of being thrown into the Mississippi River in a pair of concrete boots?
I was working for the City of Minneapolis as a “paving test aide.” Not exactly an evocative title, nor a particularly illuminating one. Still, it is a rather precise name for the role. With several other young college men, I was a quality control inspector for materials being used to pave the city’s streets in concrete. It was a civil service job that paid well. Most of my young summer colleagues were engineering students at the University of Minnesota. I was a journalism major, but I had studied enough science in college to pass the civil service examination in chemistry that was required for the job.
It was my third summer in the job at the City’s Paving Test Laboratory. The first two summers I worked exclusively in the Lab, putting sample concrete cylinders from our various street construction sites under pressure to see how much they could take before they would crack (to ensure the concrete being poured at the jobs met strength standards), and testing samples of rocks and sand from the City’s stockpiles to see that they did not contain too much moisture before being added to the cement and water to make concrete. Too much moisture in the concrete mix weakens the concrete. The work was quiet, routine, and relaxed.
I started again in the Lab at the outset of my third year, but about a month in I was transferred to the other wing of the role: supervising actual construction of streets in the field. And this is where I ran into trouble. Continue reading “In the Eye of Concrete Crime”
