First Day at Work
Posted on | August 21, 2006 | No Comments
Dammit, I already wrote most of what you are about to read but then my Opera Browser decided to have a coronary and I lost it.
So, work went well. I ended up not having to drive to Tacoma luckily. That job apparently was completed recently so I got to go to Renton instead. It’s a bit closer at least. We worked in an apartment complex which is being built. It’s weird wandering around an apartment building during construction. Parts of it look complete while other parts barely resemble an apartment building. The units, for the most part, are done. It’s a little odd to just walk from one unit to another as if I own the place. It’s also easy to lose track of which unit you are in and which unit you have done what work in.
My job today was to install some closet doors and laundry-room doors. I installed about 12 sets of laundry-room doors, which are the kind that bend in half when you pull them open. They have a real name but I just can’t think of what that is at the moment. I also installed about six sets of sliding closet doors.
Now, these door installations have never looked like they would be easy to me and, in actuality, they are even harder than they look to install. The tricky part is getting everything to line up all nice and neat. It was hard to give much of a shit about it all lining up when I would think of my own apartment and how out of whack everything is in it.
The most boring part of my day was having to put putty in all the nail holes in the trim along the bottom edges of the walls. And it hurt my knees to move around on the floor like that. I had to crawl or just sort of scoot along. Ouch! I felt like a crippled person who has to walk on their hands because they have no legs. I feel for those people…
Oh, my official title is “Carpenter,” or more accurately, “Finish Carpenter.” I got to wear a deceptively heavy tool belt and everything. I looked so butch!
I felt so manly walking around wearing that thing, and carrying my drill.
Anyways, I talked to Gabe, the guy that hired me. He’s starting me at $11 an hour for the first week, since I have no experience at all. This week is a sort of ‘let’s see how well he picks it all up‘ week. He said that as long as everything goes okay I’ll probably be at $12 an hour next week. He also said that pay raises are pretty rapid and most guys get about $15 to $18 an hour. That would be nice! This is so much better than my $8.25 an hour job, which was getting me less than 20 hours a week.
Well, I have a headache now. Not from the work but from the horrible traffic on the way home. I-5 was a bitch!
Oh, I almost forgot to mention… almost all of my coworkers are Mexican, which isn’t a problem, but there’s a language barrier which makes the job difficult. I’m new to all of the terminology and I had to keep asking Luis, the foreman, to repeat himself when he’d tell me to grab this or that. It’s also annoying to have these guys speak to each other in Spanish when I’m standing right there. It makes me paranoid that they are talking about me.
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