Consequences
So it turns out the guy who yelled at me last night has been removed from the site and won't be allowed to work on this building again.
On the one hand, I feel terrible about this. It was a misunderstanding; he was trying to do his job; he behaved badly, but so did I. We both overreacted, partly due to too little information, partly because I was too timid and too conflict-averse to treat him like a real person and talk with him before closing the door. (I should have made clear in the previous entry that I did know there were people around, I just didn't know if they were supposed to have access to the building. But I could've guessed that they were. Mostly, it didn't occur to me that if they were authorized to be there they wouldn't have a way of getting back into the building.)
And because I'm the one with the fancy computer job and he's a lowly demolitions contractor, he's the one who gets canned. (I'm hoping, from the phrasing everyone's used, that he didn't actually lose his job, just got moved to a different job, but I have no way of knowing. I did make clear, both in my original email and in three discussions today, that I really didn't mean it to escalate that far, that I just wanted to be sure the guy would let it drop, and to try to improve policies and procedures so this sort of thing wouldn't happen again. But I should've known that for a blue-collar job, the easiest way for the employer to resolve this kind of thing is to move and/or remove the employee. Ugh.)
On the other hand, I spent much of last night and this morning tense and upset about this, and knowing that the guy isn't around any more is, I admit, a bit of a relief.
On the other other hand, it's not all that much of a relief, because this didn't resolve anything. Presumably he's angrier than ever with me; I would guess from his point of view he lost his temper but did nothing seriously wrong, and as a result some coddled fragile computer guy gets him in big trouble with his boss. And I can't help but think that the other people on the job are aware of what happened and will resent it as well.
So there we have it, Jed's contribution to the class struggle for January. I'm not proud of it. But maybe I can try to learn from it and do better next time.