Tag Archives: doing business in Dickinson North Dakota

An Unethical And Underhanded Business Decision In Dickinson, North Dakota

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I have been working for a locally owned company in Dickinson, North Dakota for a little over three years.  Sometimes this company is busy, and sometimes it is slow.  About two years ago, I was promoted to manager of this company.

Myself and some of my coworkers, have had second jobs, and third jobs, outside of working for this company.  The owner of the company that I work for, and my co-workers are generally calm and mild-mannered.  None of us want to quit working for this company, because each of us are left to do our job with very little interference, each of us is treated pretty fairly, and we are fair with each other.

Last week, myself, a co-worker with two years experience, and co-worker with five years experience were scheduled to perform work for a new customer in Dickinson.  There was another long time customer that requested work last week, that one of us three experienced workers could have done, and allowed a new hire to be the third person on the other job for the new customer.  The owner of our company said to me, “No, this is important, and I want the three of you to go.  Tell the other customer that we don’t have anyone available.”

Myself, and my two co-workers, had to put aside whatever personal and work activities that we had planned, in order to go perform work for this new customer.  When we arrived at this business location, I introduced ourselves, and I asked to speak to the manager.  After about three or four minutes, the manager walked up, she was a lady who myself and my co-workers knew from other work that we had done.

The manager said, “I never got a contract back, we never signed a contract, we don’t need you.”  I was very taken aback by this, but I didn’t react in proportion to how I felt.  I said, “Oh, O.K.”  I realized that it probably was true that someone didn’t sign a contract or get a contract back.  I realized that in the lobby of this business was not the place to have an argument at this moment, especially since I didn’t know about the contract not being signed or returned.

I apologized to my co-workers, and I told them that I would telephone the owner of our company to explain what was happening.  I tried repeatedly to telephone and text the owner of our company, but I could not get in contact with him.  After about half an hour, I told my co-workers to go ahead and forget about doing this work for today.

I was very angry about what had happened.  Ever since I was about 26 years old, I had been responsible for scheduling contractors, equipment, and material.  I always tried to be very clear with all contractors and suppliers about what was needed, when it was needed, and if there were any changes or anything else that they needed to know.  It would not do me any good, my company any good, or anyone else any good, to allow a mistake to happen.  In fact, making a few costly mistakes would have resulted in me losing my job.

This lady manager, who I am tempted to refer to as “this fat bitch” for the remainder of my story, could have sent one text message, one e-mail, or made one phone call to the owner of my company a month ago, a week ago, or one day ago, stating, “We don’t need you after all, sorry.”  However, the way she chose to handle this, was to not inform the owner of our company that anything was wrong or that they didn’t need us, and to allow us to put this work on our schedule, to decline other work, and to show up with three people to perform this work.  She seemed kind of pleased with herself, and snarky when she said, “We never got a contract back, we never signed a contract, we don’t need you.”

The owner of our company has had this business in Dickinson for twenty years.  The overall manager of the business that we were going to perform work for, has been the manager there for twenty-eight years, and she has known the owner of our company for that long.  The corporate sales manager who did this underhanded thing, has been at this business for less than two years.  I don’t know why or how this lady felt that handling this the way that she did helped her or benefited her in any way.  I would expect that she will have negative consequences from this, though I don’t think she ever thought of this, or she would not have done it.

Though this kind of thing can happen, especially when one or both parties is trying to be sneaky, treacherous, or underhanded, it had never happened at this company that I work for in Dickinson, or with any other project, contractor, or supplier that I have dealt with.  However, now that I think about it, about half the time women do do things like this.

More About The Dickinson Mafia

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The first time that I wrote about the Dickinson Mafia was in my previous post, “The Dickinson Mafia”.  I stated that the Dickinson Mafia was a group of local business owners and city leaders that had decided among themselves what they envisioned for Dickinson, that they tell themselves and each other that what they want is for the betterment of Dickinson, and in the best interest of its citizens, but what they want happens to coincide with making themselves richer, controlling citizens for their benefit, and helping them maintain power.

In my previous post I gave two examples of the endeavors of the Dickinson Mafia.  Business owners can join the Chamber of Commerce to express their views about what they see for the future, and try to get other business owners to share their view.  Business owners can express their views at City Commission/Council/Zoning meetings.  They can write Letters To The Editor of the “Dickinson Press” expressing their opinions on issues.  They can join the Golf Club, the Eagles Lodge, or the Elks Lodge in order to talk to other business owners and community leaders about their ideas.  In my opinion, when business men want to get things done in a more unseen way, they join the Masonic Lodge.  The Masonic Lodge holds their meetings in private, and they do not publicize who their members are, the rank of their members, and what things they discuss.  The Masonic Lodge is very similar to the “Good-Old-Boy Network”.

Like the “Good-Old-Boy Network” in the South, a newcomer to a city who starts a construction business might be clueless as to why he seems to be having so much trouble, with everything.  The newcomer who started a construction company might know why he is having so much trouble if he knew that his main competitor is the Grand Master of the local Masonic Lodge, and that the lumber company owner, the concrete company owner, the building inspector, the city engineer, the mayor, and the chief of police are also members of the local Masonic Lodge.  Though the Masons publicly claim that this is not the case, their primary purpose and reason for existence is to have an organization of men that secretly gain power and control, and then exert their power and control.  Men that are mayors, chiefs of police, bank presidents, attorneys, real estate agents, and insurance agents do obtain information that is private and confidential, to share some information would be a violation of ethics and illegal, however this information is shared among Masons to allow financial gain, business opportunity, and to undermine, control, and manipulate others.  In the case of the Dickinson Mafia, I do not know yet whether they ever worked within the local Masonic Lodge.  It appears to me that the Dickinson Mafia is able to achieve the same things on its own: having people gain positions of power, using that power to further enrich themselves, using their money to further increase their power, using their money, power, and influence to control what is done in Dickinson, and to control people in Dickinson.  The people in Dickinson are somewhat aware that this is being done.  They think it and they feel it, but they are not always able or willing to verbalize how they are controlled by some of the wealthy business owners in Dickinson.

The way that the Dickinson Mafia want Dickinson to be, is that they want to have mechanisms of control in place so that they can control what is going on in Dickinson during the oil booms that come and go, so that they can also have control when the oil booms go away.  It does not matter where you are from, have you ever seen more vacant barren land anywhere than what there is outside of Dickinson?  There is vacant undeveloped land as far as you can see, and beyond as far as you can see.  There is no scarcity of vacant land.  The cost of housing in Dickinson, and the shortage of housing in Dickinson is something that the Dickinson Mafia want.  Though quick, affordable housing was something that was needed starting back in 2010, the Dickinson Mafia didn’t want that.  They didn’t want out-of-state workers to come here, make a lot of money, send money back home, pay off their houses back home, get ahead financially, the Dickinson Mafia wanted the out-of-state workers to be taken advantage of, just like they have been taking advantage of the workers in their own businesses for the last thirty years.

One more thing, if you try to look up the “Dickinson Mafia” on the internet, the first six results of your search are an exact match for “Dickinson Mafia”.  You can go and look at each of these six matching websites, web addresses, or links, and they really don’t contain any content that is relevant to an entity or activity that would or could be called “Dickinson Mafia”.  It is like someone had the expectation that people would be trying to find out information about the “Dickinson Mafia” and they wanted to make sure that your internet search would be sure to turn up their six websites, that contain no information on the Dickinson Mafia.  That is one way to try to keep people from knowing about the Dickinson Mafia.