So August 13th, the morning of our formal reunion,
Brenny calls me and asks me if I want to work
with her for forty dollars an hour.
I told her I did then told her I didn't.
My anxiety about my reunion was at 100%
since it seems like most of our classmates went right to
college and have had cool careers for thirty years
which made me feel like the biggest loser in the world.
So, I left it at no and enjoyed the reunion and woke up
the next morning broke and wanting to work.
I called Brenny and picked her up and we went to a
drug testing clinic at Northgate, where we sat for three hours
waiting for a drop in drug test that ending up taking one minute.
Funny 'cause Bren flunked anyway 'cause she drank too much water.
So Monday, August 16th, I woke up at four AM and was out on the highway
to carpool with Bren and her Nephew Eric and his brother-in-law Robert.
Eric had one of those fancy-pants Chevy SUVs that was like
a Cadillac on steroids AND it had a built in TV!
How stupid is a car manufacturer to build that on a dashboard?!
We got out to Superior Cleaning in Woodinville and jumped in
the crew van at five AM. We made a stop for more crew at Southcenter.
Now I'll tell you what Mr. Blog,
I have worked real jobs since I was sixteen in 1973
and I have NEVER worked with such honest, funny, hardworking
people as I did cleaning the soot off the new city hall down
in Olympia. A stupid kid, on probation, started the fire
where the police department will eventually go.
The fire fighters put out the fire but the smoked did
three million dollars worth of damage to the unfinished building.
So we arrive at the building and are given our PPE stuff.
That is construction lingo for personal protective equipment.
Well Mr. Blog, the last time I had to wear a hard hat
was in 1978 when I was digging ditches for the street maintenence
crew for the City of Seattle Engineering Department!
It was darn annoying on my head all day long!
I brought saftey glasses from home but when Eric saw them
he started laughing his head off on the way to Woodinville
and said, "Where the heck did you get those, from a NASA store?!"
I discreetly shoved them in the bottom of my backpack.
So we got our hardhats, safety glasses, reflective vests and rubber gloves,
earplugs and dust masks and we started working.
There was no meeting that morning so Brenny
and I just followed the other workers.
We were like a trail of ants inside this enormous building!
The rest of the crew had been there for weeks and cleaned the
second, third, fourth and fifth floors and we started our day
carrying all the equipment down from the first floor to the basement.
Well Mr. Blog, I had always wanted to go inside a construction site
of a huge building since I was a little girl and
my wish was granted.
But it turned out to be very scary!
There we eletrical cords on the floor everywhere that you had to
watch out for to run all the cleaning machines.
I lost Brenny in the maze in ten seconds and just followed
a guy named Chris around.
We carried all kinds of buckets and cleaning stuff
downstairs into the dark labyrinth of the basement.
I kept waiting for an alien monster to pop out of the
ceiling grid-work any minute!
My safety glasses constantly fogged up from my state of terror.
Chris and I started carrying these metal parts downstairs
and I accidentally whacked a guy turning a corner on
a landing. I felt terrible
and had to concentrate like crazy not to injure anyone!
Once we had everything downstairs I found out what the
big metal things were.
Scaffolds!
Ugh!
When I turned fifty and quit having bravery hormones,
I got not only afraid of heights, but also veritgo when up high.
I watched the other workers assembling the scaffolds
with a level of anxiety higher than anything
I'd had since getting ready for my high school reunion
the previous Friday.
It did not help that the board fell off one and landed
on a guys toes. Luckily he had on steel toed boots.
Brenny found me and we were handed scrubbers
and assigned a scaffold to scrub soot off the upper
walls and ceilings.
She scrambled up like a happy monkey
and I followed her up, just barely avoiding
puking on myself.
I'll tell you what Mr. Blog.
THAT WAS THE LONGEST FOUR HOURS OF MY LIFE!
Brenny is a lot younger and taller than I am
by a year and an inch
so when she started scrubbing at full strength
the floor of our scaffold was bouncing like a trampoline!
I would grab the railing to keep from falling off
but they were loosy-goosy and wiggled a half foot either way!
The sheer terror I was feeling had the disadvantageous effect
of making my safety googles steam up
so then I was blind, deaf from my ear plugs,
bouncing like a ping pong ball
BUT making forty dollars an hour!
At lunch we got to come down and I dragged myself to
the outhouses out across the road from the job site.
Brenny went to make phone calls so I wearily
followed ten crew members across the street
to the shaded sidewalk next to the auto parts store.
That was my routine for the next four days.
Drag to the wall, lean back against it and slide
down the the lovely cool concrete sidewalk and gulp as much
fresh air as I could during the half hour.
My career as a construction clean-up artist
took a turn for the better after lunch.
A Albanian gal named Margarita became our lead-person
and we were assigned a luxurious job on the ground.
Nothing was ever bad after being on the scaffold.
She was around forty and a compact gal right out of the "Alien" movie.
She had on tight black clothing with color coordinated
tool belt and tiny steel-toed boots.
She took to me and Brenny like scrambled eggs
to salt and pepper!
We were sent to a back bathroom to clean these four foot
long light fixtures.
Margarita trained us to disassemble them, clean them
and reassemble them to meet the IH standards.
IH is the industrial hygenist job that she was
certified in. When a job is done, government inspectors
check for soot and if there is one speck it has to be redone!
Isn't that interesting?!
*looks at Mr. Blog who is gently snoring on his couch*
So we did that for the rest of that day and at the end
of each day we had a debriefing in the huge room
by our foreman, whom Brenny and I hadn't met yet.
We were sitting on overturned buckets side-by-side
with our other two dozen co-workers when our foreman showed up.
Brenny threw me an elbow and whispered,
"Check him out."
I removed my steamed up safety glasses and there was Trevor.
He looked like a thirty year old Nicholas Cage and Val Kilmer
had been put in a splice machine.
Now he looked much better than soot and Brenny whispered,
"He's definetely Mr. Smokin' Hot!"
It was so hard not to laugh!
So that was what we called him all week when no one was around
and if people were around we called him, Mr."SH" for code.
It always made us laugh and smile no matter how
hot, tired, exhausted and cranky we were.
The second day of our job we got moved to two tables in the
big room to work on cleaning light fixtures and later
white cabinents and drawers.
Now I don't know how I got off the scaffolding gig,
but there were enough light fixtures and cabinenets
to kill a horse that needed cleaning.
We go into a rythym by the third day and felt fairly good
about going to work except for Thursday morning.
I had unplugged my alarm clock to plug in my laptop and was
sound asleep Thursday morning.
I was dreaming I had a cleaning crew cleaning my huge
beach house, which doesn't exsist in real life,
when Brenny came up to the yard and was calling for me.
Well! I woke up and my other clock said 4:50AM and I ran to the
phone machine and told her to wait there.
I jumped in my clothes, flung open the door
and felt the chilled air and looked down to
see I was missing my pants!
Once I got those on
I ran to the highway
and hopped in the driver's seat of my van
and drag-raced from Kenmore to Woodinville
and pulled in the parking lot
at five AM!
The crew was still waiting around for Eric to come out
and load the van to Olympia!
That was a close call and I slept most of the way down
and back everyday wearing my sleep-mask, foam ear plugs
and orange Home Depot headphones with my inflatable neck-pillow
that I used to use when I was a flight attendant commuting
from Bothell to Denver then later to Honolulu for work.
Well, that job ended a week ago Mr. Blog
and my right arm and shoulder are still tender
and if I raise my arm and lower it my joints
sound like pop corn popping.
The important thing is that when
I got paid, I handed Terry one hundred dollars
for allowance and that job saved my marriage.
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