When i was 18, I was working as a summer job on a massive construction site as a helping hand for a company doing plumbing. For three weeks a supervisor on the site made my life hell, and I could not work out why. Nothing I did was right. He found fault with work I knew was good, gave me the jobs nobody wanted, and kept nagging and provoking me with what, to him, were witty remarks. I assumed that’s the standard treatment for newbies.

Then one morning he walked me over to a bare concrete floor with a single pipe coming out of it. He took a pen out of his pocket and drew a rectangle on the concrete around the pipe, about the size of a dinner plate. That was the hole he wanted, the pipe freed of the concrete poured around it. He handed me the heaviest hammer and a chisel, and he walked off.

It was seven in the morning. I knelt down and started.

Concrete does not give. You hit it and the shock travels back up your arms and a little dust comes off, and that is your progress. I caught my own hand with the hammer more than once. It split and bled and I kept going, because I was being watched, or thought I was, and because finishing the thing in front of me was the only way I knew how to be a person. By half past eleven, I had made some progress, but nowhere near the set task.

That was when another crew sat down nearby to have their lunch break. One of them watched me for a while, ten minutes maybe, then walked off and came back with a drill hammer and set it down next to me. Just do it and be done with it, he said. I took it the way a man in a desert takes water. I cut the hole in minutes. I went wider than his rectangle, out of something like pride, and I walked to the supervisor’s office and told him I was finished.

He looked genuinely surprised. That should have told me everything, but it didn’t. He got up and came to look.

He stood over the hole for a moment. Then he took the same pen out of the same pocket, drew a fresh rectangle two inches bigger all the way around, and walked back to his office without a word.

That was the moment the whole three weeks made sense. He did not want the pipe freed. He wanted to find out how long I would keep hurting myself if he kept telling me to. The rectangle was a dial he could turn, and I had been turning it for him, gladly, with a bleeding hand, because I had been raised to believe the man who keeps working is the good one.

So I sat down and did nothing. Jack shit, until the end of the day. Well, not actually nothing. I hit a hammer every now and then, making the hole nicer. Like an artist.

Doing nothing was harder than the hammer. The hammer only hurt my hand. Sitting there refusing to work cost me the thing I believed I was, the honest one, the one you could count on to keep going no matter what. Some part of me spent the whole afternoon insisting I was being lazy and dishonest, and it took me until nearly dark to understand that the refusal was the honest move and the effort had been the lie.

But that is not what made him stop. I want to be straight about that, because for years I told this as a story about standing up for myself, and it isn’t one.

Every worksite of that size has a company that inspects a site, the one that comes round and signs off that everything has been built the way the drawings say. My father worked for one, but this particular one was not assigned to him. A colleague of his was away for the summer and my dad had been sent to cover, which is the only reason he ever turned up at mine.

It was the middle of July and I was down in a ditch with a shovel, clearing dirt off a pipe we needed to reach. The bully stood at the lip of it above me, in the shade, asking every so often how it was going. I was dripping off the end of my nose.

A shadow came across the ditch. The shape at the top of it asked how it was going, with a smirk I could hear more than see. I recognized my dad’s voice, but I was hot and head-down and out of patience, so I told him to fuck off and leave me be.

The shadow left. And the second it was a few meters off, the bully turned on me, all frown and outrage. Do you know who that is, he said.

Yeah, I said. That’s my dad. And I kept shoveling.

After that day he eased off. Not all at once, but the foot came off the gas and stayed off. He did not stop because of the rectangle, or the bleeding, or the three weeks I spent absorbing everything he threw at me, or even the afternoon I finally sat down and refused. He stopped because he found out I was somebody’s son, that the somebody signed off on everything we do, and that a phone call existed which could one day land on his desk.

I had spent weeks believing the contest was between his cruelty and how much of it I could take. It was settled by an accident of who my father happened to be, and by me being too hot and head-down to dress up the way I spoke to him.