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the damn hammer bounced

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In high school i had a co-op class where i worked at a fence and deck building company that also did industrial construction. I was basically the shovel bitch, i dug all the post holes for the fences and stuff. The day i call “Black Thursday” i got dropped off at a house a half hour drive out of town to dig post holes, just me and another guy. Get there at 8:30 am, doing some measurements and 20 minutes in buddy gets called away to another site and says he’ll be back before lunch. I start digging holes but the ground is so hard that the shovel won’t dig in; it’s so compact that the claw end of my hammer bounces when i hit it trying to break it up. So i do this for a while and when 2pm rolls around and buddy hasn’t come back i figure screw it, lunch break. No go, my lunch is still in his truck. When 5pm hits and he still hasn’t come back, it’s obvious he aint. The home owners didn’t get home until then too, so i was there, alone, all day, in the middle of nowhere, during a heat wave, digging holes in concrete, without having eaten anything since dinner the night before. My shift ended at 5:30 so I call up my boss, using the home owners phone, and he answers “oh right, you” he then tells me that there’s one of their crews working at an industrial site nearby and that i should go to it. I figure whatever, my days done. The site’s 12km away and he expected me to walk it with all the tools and gear and he honestly couldn’t understand why i told him to blow it out ass and send somebody to pick me up. Half hour later the guy from the other site shows up, we go to the site and im standing there thinking i’ll wait while they gather their stuff and we all leave. Nope, the guy yells at me to get in there and do some work. I yell back. He yells some more. I say fuck it, fine. I end up swinging a sledge hammer for three hours breaking down cinder block walls. At the end i was so exhausted that i could barely hold the sledge in my hands, it even got away from me once and almost hit somebody. The “best” part is that i wasn’t authorized to be on industrial construction sites nor did i have the proper safety equipment except for my boots. no hard hat, no safety glasses, no breathing protection, im asthmatic and the place was little rooms filled with concrete dust so thick in the air it stung your eyes. One more thing, it was subsidized pay so it was less than minimum wage. Awesome.

steve | July 16, 2012

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