Uncredible - The Book (Sample 8)
Chapter 1 (continued)
The following is an excerpt from a short e-book I’m currently working on called, “Uncredible — The Book: The Art of Becoming Nobody.” In the future, content like this will be reserved for paid subscribers but, for now, please enjoy!
One MAN Left Standing (continued)
The next few hours were tense as the team leader rushed him to the hospital.
When he finally returned, he could tell everyone was a little shaken up.
Maybe he thought the incident affected me more because I was young.
Either way, he tried to lighten the mood.
“Well,” he said, “it looks like we should stop betting against you.”
The room erupted in laughter.
And work continued.
As the summer rolled on, I became a fixture on the shipping team.
The jokes slowly turned into respect.
The respect turned into trust.
Eventually, I could be trusted with any job on the team and was largely left alone to do my work.
With only a few weeks remaining before I returned to school, my luck finally ran out.
I was assembling another crate using a few warped boards.
At the final corner, I had to squeeze the pieces together with all my strength just to make them line up.
Thwap!
I fired the staple gun.
A sharp pain shot through my thumb.
Immediately, I knew what had happened.
One leg of the staple had struck a knot in the wood and ricocheted out the side of the board, driving straight through the fleshy end of my thumb.
It hurt.
Badly.
I rushed to the nearest sink and held it under cold water.
The room started to spin.
I took a few slow breaths and waited for the dizziness to pass.
When I finally examined the injury, I realized I had gotten lucky.
The staple had gone deep, but it missed both the bone and the nail.
I wrapped my thumb in a Band-Aid and slowly walked back to my station.
The team leader looked at me.
“You okay?”
I lied through my teeth.
“Yup. Nothing serious.”
To this day, I think he knew I was hurt.
I also think he respected the fact that I kept working.
Then again, he was a little shady and probably wasn’t interested in filling out any additional safety paperwork.
Maybe it was both.
Either way, I finished the summer.
The skinny Bible college kid they laughed at on day one was still standing.
Most of the guys who had arrived after me were gone.
The bet had been settled.
How do I know?
On my last day, I was called into the office.
Someone handed me a paper bag and instructed me not to open it until my wedding night.
I was also told to take it directly to my car.
Inside was a bottle of champagne.
At nineteen, I was underage.
It was probably a questionable decision.
But it was also their way of saying something they would never say out loud.
You made it.
Looking back, that’s what made the gesture meaningful.
These weren’t executives, professors, or managers.
They were factory workers.
Men who spent their lives doing hard jobs that most people never notice.
They didn’t care about degrees.
They didn’t care about titles.
They didn’t care about future plans.
They cared about one thing:
Did you show up and do the work?
For the first time in my life, I had become credible in the eyes of the uncredible.
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Readings Intro℗ generated using Suno by Jeremy Lundmark on June 22, 2026