Doug: Work

Dear Reader,

This was going to be an introductory post to everyone, but I decided that was lame, and was too much like writing a novel. This is not fiction, this is real life, which, as Chuck Palahniuk says, "is often stranger than fiction". Therefore, I'm just going to jump into this bitch, and you can just HTFU.

Today I'm going to talk about my work. I work in construction, which is quite possibly one of the most frustrating, difficult, and physically demanding jobs on the planet. It's just a summer job for me; I have the good fortune to know my boss via another venue and therefore acquiring said job went sort of like this: Doug: "Hey, uh, I need a summer job." My boss: "Word, show up at this location at six tomorrow." Doug: "It's that easy?" My boss: "You want to fill out a job application?". Doug: "Not so much, no."

Before this I had spent almost a month and a half trying to find a job in the rest of the world. I tried Dions, I tried Smiths, I tried Fed Ex, Cold Stone, plenty of places. The one rule I had was that I would not allow myself to sink to the level of working at places like Wendys, McDonalds, or Whataburger. I know I sound arrogant, or at the very least elitist, but I like to think I'm better than that.

It's a proven fact that if you are 18, just out of High School, and male then you are practically unhirable. This is due to several reasons, the first being that there are just so damn many fresh out of High School kids out there hunting for jobs. The second reason is that for most of these guys it's their first job. No one wants to hire some stupid teenager that has absolutely no experience whatsoever in the service industry. First off, you have to train the fucker. That takes time, and costs money, which is of primary importance to the suits back at corporate. The second is, he or she is a teenager, their concept of on time is mostly suspect, if it's there at all. If i were to get all my high school classmates together in one room, get their collective attention (some feat) and yell "Hey, how many of you been late to work this week?" I'd get about three quarters of the hands in the room raised. High School labor is just unreliable, they, unlike their border hopping or recently retiredanddidn'tsavemoneyforretirement coworkers, don't have to rely on their work cash flow for survival. Most of them are only working seasonally anyway, once you get them trained up they work for about two weeks and then bounce off to college or other parts unknown.

Basically, getting a job's a bitch and a half.

But back to my work, which is what I was talking about in the first place. Construction. Dirty, dangerous, physically demanding, frustrating, and most of all HARD. Working in up to one hundred degree heat for eight hours a day with few breathers and even fewer actual rests is difficult. The equipment you use is often damaged or altogether broken for no apparent reason, and always requires hard physical effort to use. The machines that make the work easier are dangerous, and the second you stop respecting them they will hurt you. The work order is often frustratingly vague, and oftentimes you will have to redo a job twice or even three times before it's done correctly. Tools that are an absolute necessity are missing or left at other work sites, and you must make do with what you have because you don't have the time to go get the proper tool. The person you're building the whatever it is for will often change their minds, causing an entire day's work to be not only rendered worthless, but now actively hindering the new plan. Electric and gas lines are mislabelled and manpower is tied up trying to figure out where a pipe goes or what powers what. I once saw work on a site suspended for six hours because a gas line was punctured and the gas contractor couldn't fix the problem, or even look at it for that long. Contractors are another problem, to build something the work is often divided up between several contracting companies, all of which are hired to do specific jobs such as plumbing, ventilation, roofing, drywalling. The problem is that none of these people have worked with each other before, or if they have it's only been for a brief time. They get in each other's way, or at worst actively hinder the others. Language is a barrier too, many times workers only speak English or Spanish, so any kind of coordinated effort or plan is reduced to sign language and much Spanglish.

Despite all of this, I love my job and think that I have possibly the greatest job in the world. I get to WRECK shit. I get to use tools that have little warnings on them about how they could maim or kill me. I get to hang upside down from ladders thirty to forty feet in the air and nail gun stuff. I balance on scaffolding that makes a rickety rope bridge look tame. I hammer nails, I saw wood, I wire buildings, I plumb houses, I hang doors, I am the quintessential handyman. If there's a problem I can't fix with a nail and a hammer, I'll find the appropriate tool and I'll fix that sonofabitch if it's the last thing I do.

When I'm not building something, I'm tearing something up so that something can be built. Here's a few of the tools I use on a daily basis:

Crowbar, my personal fave, if I can't wreck it, take it out or otherwise remove it from my path of destruction with my crowbar, then it simply cannot be moved.

Hammer: Not my favorite, but damned useful. It's just so simple: Place nail, apply force, job finished. Bitchin.

Sawzal: Basically a power saw shaped like a gun. I've seen sawzals cut through concrete, metal piping, nails, and anything else that could possibly exist on a construction site. I've yet to meet a force that can stop this bastard. I'm pretty sure that if I decided to take a sawzal to Wolverine he's be like "Oh shit, my adamantium skeleton just got SAWED IN HALF!"

Ninety percent sure on that last one.

That's just a sampling of tools, there are many more, all of them awesome. They ooze awesome. Like pop tarts.

But my all time favorite thing about work is the people. The people I work with and for are absolutely insane, every one of them. I have three bosses, and one co worker. My bosses are not people who wear suits and sip Cognac. My main boss comes to work wearing jeans and a polo, and by the end of the day is covered in sawdust, glue, cuts, and various other construction related ejecta. He leads from the front, and despite being a fifty year old man does more work than anyone else on the job. I will often see him attacking a set of wooden studs with a sawzal, laughing manically, and surrounded in a haze of smoke from the massive stogie he's got clenched between his teeth. My first day at work I was told to take out the drywall in a house that had been burned out. I grab my crowbar and start gently peeling the drywall off the studs. My boss comes over, says "no no no no no no. no." grabs my crowbar and slams it into wall, knocking a massive sheet of drywall off. "We don't half ass around here." was his only comment.

My other two bosses are about ten years younger, and I spend most of my time with them. One is short and muscular, with a mustache that while not particularly large still manages to intimidate if you get too close. The other is tall and gangly, with facial hair as well, whatever it's called when you shave the chops but nothing else. The short one is dark, the other light, and they contrast each other similarly. Greg (the short one) is quiet and professional, but with a funny side too. Kevin, (tall and white) is gregarious, and rarely stops talking. They have been friends since high school, and harass each other with the ease of people who know each other so well they don't even have to ask what the other is thinking. Both are really nice guys that work like dogs to get the job done. They both smoke like chimneys, and don't take water breaks but rather "smoke breaks". Kevin smokes Marlboro Lights and Greg likes Camels.

My co worker and I went to the same high school together, although we didn't run in the same social circles, so our first real meeting took place at work. We'll often start to talk about people at school and then ask if the other knows them, to which the reply will often be, "Yeah! I didn't know you hung out with him!" He is tall, thickset, not overweight, but large. Despite his football player exterior (which he didn't actually play) he is quite intelligent, and often comes up with alternative solutions to problems that are actually more efficient than the ones proposed by our bosses. He likes country, and will often sing along (loudly) with the radio when a favorite of his comes on.

My personal faves are the clients though. They always make things interesting, and at times, frustrating. For example, one of our clients keeps changing the plan for what she wants done, so we'll often have to do a job, twice or even three times on her whim. I'm not going to say she's the we make fun of her behind her back, but we do. Another is totally cool, she'll give us drinks out of her cooler if we look tired, and jokes around about construction mistakes as if she was one of the guys. Another guy had his house burned down, and we keep finding empty cases of beer on the work site. We know it's not us, not because none of us drink, but because none of us drink the beer that we find. It's kind of sad.

Also, the things we build are great. For example, one of our customers wants a Tai Chi room, where she can practice Karate and Zen out. The room is off her master bedroom and is, incidentally, bigger than it. It's going to have a rock garden in it. Another Customer is building a 4,000 square foot closet. For just her shoes. I'm not even going to go there right now, I'll just let you ponder exactly how much space that is... for shoes.

Insanity tends to arise on construction sites. You really get a feel for how much you personally can accomplish with hard work. It becomes easy to see how things like the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China were built using the most basic of tools. Situations arise where proper equipment would either cost too much to rent or simply isn't available. For example, At a site where we were replacing doors for a family, we had to get a three to four hundred pound door up twenty vertical feet. It was too big to go up the stairs, and was made of glass, so we couldn't really abuse it without suffering financial consequences, namely, none of us would get paid for a few weeks if we dropped it. So we used raw muscle strength, hauling it up to where it needed to be using our bare hands, knowing that a single missed command or failure of our bodies could lead to the door falling. This would not only cause thousands of dollars of property damage, but possibly kill or maim those shoving it up from the bottom.

Long story short: We did it.

A few hours later we realized that we'd made a mistake, and this door that we'd nearly killed ourselves hauling up actually belonged on the ground floor. At this point we were so exhausted, physically, emotionally, and mentally that the simple thought of facing that door again was almost completely demoralizing. Getting it up was such a triumph, and now we had to tear our accomplishment down. On top of that was the sheer physical impossibility of it. Getting things up without breaking them is easy, getting them down is so much harder.

We devised a plan to use two extension ladders as a ramp, and ropes to lower it down. Our main fear was that the ladders would kick out because of the weight of the door, causing it to fall. It would be impossible to hold on to an object of such mass, any attempt and you would be dragged over the ledge with it. Slowly, very slowly, we brought our plan to fruition.

When that door touched the ground safely I was more euphoric than I have ever been at any medal ceremony, graduation, or commencement event I've ever been at. Medals are just pieces of ribbon, diplomas just pieces of paper, they mean nothing. This door was insignificant in the scheme of the house, but we had poured ourselves into this door. When we brought it down safely, it was as though we had averted doomsday. Sheer dogged determination had won the day. To see with your own eyes your accomplishments, your plan put into effect, the physical results of your hard work, is far more powerful than any scrap of paper, any ribbon on a uniform.

Crazy bosses, A four thousand square foot shoe room, broken beer bottles, old sweat and cigarette smoke, the hiss-thunk of a nail gun, the low growl of the sawzal, the squeak of a screw slamming home.

It's just a summer job. But I love it. Tomorrow we have a one thousand pound door to get up twenty vertical feet. As the Wu-Tang say:
Bring it on.

-Doug

"When you can't run you walk,
When you can't walk you crawl,
And when you can't do that,
You find someone to carry you."
-Malcolm Reynolds
Firefly