EP05: "My Dad Didn't Raise a B*tch" | From School Teacher to the Shop Floor - Candace Forbes

Candace didn't grow up planning to run a fab shop. She spent nine years teaching middle school ELA and math. Then her father called and said he was going to sell the family business... the one built with his brother thirty years earlier, the one her older brother was supposed to inherit before he died of a heart attack.She said yes.What followed was a year and a half on the shop floor learning to fit and weld from the men who'd been there since before she was born.. one of whom told her she'd never amount to anything, and another who looked at her painted nails and said he wasn't sure this was for her. She proved both of them wrong. She also cried in her car most of the way home for the better part of a year.In this episode, Candace talks about walking into plants where engineers assume she's decoration, the outage in Louisiana where a mechanic went over her head about a welding rod and got publicly humiliated by the results, the day she and her dad screamed at each other in front of the whole crew, and the afternoon her quiet 18-year-old son walked into his grandparents' office and told them they weren't going to ruin what his mother had built.It's a conversation about the legacy you didn't ask for, proving yourself in a room that already decided about you, and how badly a grown woman can still need to hear her father say he's proud.