The Judge
May 1, 2023
Imagine yourself in the year 1999. You are looking for a job and somebody tells you about a scrappy bunch of guys at a start-up concrete company. Sounds interesting enough so you arrange to meet the guy in charge and realize it’s not as much of a start-up company as it is a bunch of guys who are hustling concrete to make a living. Back in those days, HR wasn’t exactly top-of-mind, so a solid referral or gut feeling was about all the application process consisted of. You pass the first-impression test and feel pretty good about your prospects as a potential concrete guy. After-all, you are young and strong and how hard could it be? The pay is pretty good, so you agree to show up at the designated job site the next morning.
At 5:00 a.m. you are jolted awake by your alarm clock radio. Still rubbing the sleep out of your eyes, you pull up to a seemingly random residence in a typical neighborhood ready to throw around some concrete or whatever these guys do. You think to yourself, “can’t be that hard”.
As you walk up you take stock of a few guys who look like they have already been at it for a while or may have even slept at that location the night before. They stop what they are doing and with firm handshakes, introduce themselves by nicknames that were hard earned and that you’ll have to pay your dues to learn the backstories of. They seem like nice enough guys though so after a minimal amount of idle chit-chat, you ask what they need you to do. This is where you begin to understand that paying your dues starts right now. Their almost imperceptible smirks start to erode your feeling of “can’t be that hard”. That is when you are introduced to the last and most menacing member of the crew. The Judge.
You see, The Judge doesn’t look like much. After all, it’s just an inanimate object. A fiberglass handle with a 20-pound forged steel head. Couldn’t have cost more than $18 brand new but by the looks of this thing, it might have been used to build the railroads. You don’t ask questions because you are the new guy, but you think to yourself, why name a sledgehammer? When someone hands you a sledgehammer with a knowing smirk, you realize that can only mean one thing. You are about to spend the next little while doing the only thing you can think of that a sledgehammer is good for. Breaking shit.
When you showed up rubbing your eyes you didn’t notice the crumbling surface you are standing on. Now that you are holding The Judge, you understand that the cracking and heaving recreational pad is the sole reason you were promised a paycheck. That old concrete patio has to go away in order to become a new concrete patio. Suddenly that 20-pound forged steel head starts to feel a little more like an anvil on a stick. Which it is. What you didn’t realize, and the reason for the smirks on the faces of the guys with nicknames, is that The Judge is more than what you thought it was. Yes, it is a sledgehammer destined for a lifetime of brutal smashing, but it got its nickname for a very good reason. That 20-pound anvil on a stick is called The Judge because it reveals character. It not only decimates concrete but also B.S. and bravado. It tells the guys who have swung it before you whether you have what it takes. In fact, they know before you do if you will come back. They also know that if you can swing The Judge all day today, and show up tomorrow, you start earning your nickname. And once you earn your nickname, you might even get to be one of the smirking guys handing The Judge to the next new guy.
Now-a-days, The Judge sits in Sonny Hall’s office. retired after a long career doing what it was built to do and wrapped in about three pounds of various kinds of tape. The tape was accumulated over the years to keep the splinters at bay. According to Sonny, “the blisters were earned, but the splinters were a bitch”. The real reason an old sledgehammer leans up against a shelf full of industry awards, photographs, and memorabilia that has been earned over more than two decades is that it did so much more than it was built to do. It helped to shape the first generation of Absolute team members. We are who we are today because of the character and culture instilled by the guys who swung The Judge and came back.
Yes – The Judge is retired but we still carry its legacy with us today. Maybe in a more HR-friendly manner these days, but our culture is a living thing. It is embodied in the work-ethic that we bring with us as we pull up to work rubbing the sleep out of our eyes every morning.