With All The Tension, I Expect Chainsaw Duels Soon

Any of you watch Ax Men? I wouldn't say it's a favorite show of mine, but I'll catch episodes of it when I can. Actually, considering how little television I watch these days, that might be enough to qualify as a favorite.

They were running several episodes in a row last night, so there was quite a bit of the conflict between Craig Rygaard and Dave, an employee that Craig really hates, but can't convince his son to fire. Which leads to Craig pretty much constantly riding Dave's butt, chewing him out, applauding anyone else who gives Dave a hard time, because maybe it'll drive Dave off.

It all strikes me as terribly unproductive. Sure, some of the other guys on the crew don't like Dave, but they're adults, and they're professionals, so they ought to be able to accept they aren't always gonna love everybody they work with, and suck it up. Dave deserves some of the crap he gets*, but I think things would run smoother if people didn't waste so much time pranking him, or complaining about him, or whatever. The fact that Craig clearly has an axe to grind with Dave, though, encourages all the other guys to do so as well, rather than getting over it and concentrating on work. It's like a classroom where there's one student the teacher picks on and belittles constantly, and what's more he actively encourages the other kids to do the same. So of course they're going to join in. They get to feel big, and curry favor at the same time.

I really don't like Craig. Actually, watching this show, I don't like a lot of the older guys. The guy running the Lemere operation seems petulant**, and Jimmy - who's trawling the Suwanee River for logs with his son - I don't know what his deal is. I hope he's hamming up his jerk tendencies for the camera, because if not, it's a miracle his son hasn't drowned him yet. Or at least thrown him off the boat. Jimmy never listens, never accepts blame, tries to rewrite history to make himself look better***, and of course, nothing anyone else does is ever good enough for him.

* In one of the episodes, he was asleep in his truck when the day started, and got to work 45 minutes late, which I could see pissing off all the guys who started on time.

** He needs a piece of equipment to be fixed. He arrives at the machine shop, finds the mechanic missing, and his thermos sitting on the piece of machinery. His response is to walk outside, find some piece of metal, and throw it at the guy's thermos. What purpose did that serve? He could just as easily picked up the thermos and threw it.

They're going down the river and see this massive log. He says it's pine, the guy his son hired to help correctly identifies it as cypress. Less than a minute later, Jimmy's claiming he knew it was cypress all along, knew it right from the start, while the other fellow is standing right there.