b"Did you attend other union meetings? Well, the meetings were always at the union hall here. But we also went to Atlantic City. They used to be the shopsteward conference there. I was in the negotiating committee and we did that. It was always close. I used to sit in at themeetings downstairs with the Housing Authority and [negotiate] for our demands.You were part of negotiating committees?Committee, yeah. One [issue] was that we fought with the managers. At one time, we used to have skilled trades thatmake more money than the superintendents themselves. But any amount of time that we used to put in, it was comp time. But not paid?But not paid. And usually, it depends what district you worked in, you got to take it within a couple of weeks. Other-wise it's history. It's no more money. Now, you see these plumbers and carpenters that you don't supervise but they workunder you, and they make more money than you. So, superintendents and managers got together and, finally while I wasworking being part of the committee, we actually got managers and superintendents to get paid if they work overtime.Thats one of the things that I'm proud of. The only thing is you just can't take it upon yourself to stay and make overtime.You have to get approval from the district. We had to go to meetings with the tenant association at night after working awhole day. There you get battered for all sorts of things, if they're broke and this and that. These meetings could get really, how do you say? Loud. And you're not really in the mood, but you have to compose yourself and stand there. And you're not even getting paid. We found that once we start getting paid, managers and superintendents were going to these tenant association meetings less and less. There's a lot of things that we fought for.You did a number of different jobs. Can you tell me about a typical day or week on a job and what that involved? Okay, uh, wow. The biggest thing is that, as soon as you sit behind the desk, you feel that you should be somewhereelse. One of the first things that you wanted to do, not just to check who's in or not, but you're supposed to be walking onthe grounds to make sure that your supervisor under you is doing his job. You check on the grounds men, the caretakers.Depending on theweather, you have to make sure that they shovel the snow, there's no hazards, and you want to checkthe lobbies. You got to be out there and make sure that people are doing their job. But you yourself, you can be doingthings on the phones and follow up from the day before and everything else. That's why I used to stay on my own time.Tomorrow morning, I want to have a nice clean start because as soon as you sit down, you feel like you should be doingsomething else. You get in touch with the boiler room to see that everything is okay. It's required for the superintendentto go to the heating plant and converse with the person that's working inside the boiler room and sign the log. You talk tothe fireman in the boiler room. He has to put the entries when he receives oil and you see if there are any discrepancies.You have to check with the heating plant technician to make sure that he does all the water analysis. They check for acidityand there's a lot of chemicals they put in the water. Hard water can damage the stay bolts that hold the metal plates to-gether. There is so much money that the Housing Authority was spending to replace these stay bolts that keep thesemetal plates together. You are talking about thousands and thousands of dollars. So, you have to check that they aredoing it right. You got to stay on top, because you got to make sure that all these people are doing what needs to bedone. The maintenance workers start at 8 o'clock. They get their work tickets downstairs from the assistant superintend-85 "