Sunday, October 2, 2011

10/2/2010 Mr. Smokin' Hot or How I Did Construction Clean Up at the New Olympia City Hall in 2010

So Friday August 13th,the morning of our formal 35TH year reunion,
Brenda calls me and asks me if I want to work
with her for forty dollars an hour.
Well, duh.
Monday morning 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?!
I had brought safety glasses from home and Brenda and I were
in the back seat admiring them and trying them on.
When Eric saw them in his rear-view mirror, he laughed his head off and said,
"Where the heck did you get those, the a NASA store?!"
I discreetly shoved them in the bottom of my backpack.
We were hired to scrub soot at the new city hall in Olympia.
An arsonist had started a fire and before the fire fighters
put out the fire the smoked did three million dollars
worth of damage to the unfinished building.
When we got out of the crew van in Olympia, Brenda and I were
astonished to see a well-endowed hooker with a hair bed.
She was very nice and let us take a picture of her.
We walked over to the equipment van and were given our PPE stuff.
That is construction lingo for personal protective equipment.
We got our hardhats, safety glasses, reflective vests, rubber gloves,
earplugs, dust masks and went to work.
The supervisor was off site so Brenda
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
upper floors so we started our day carrying all the
equipment down from the first floor to the basement.
I had always wanted to go inside a construction site
of a huge building since I was a little girl,
but it turned out to be very scary!
There were electrical cords on the floor everywhere that you had to
watch out for (or be electrocuted) to run all the cleaning machines.
I lost Bren in the maze in ten seconds and just followed
a big tall 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 and attack me any minute!
My safety glasses constantly fogged up from my state of fright.
Chris and I started carrying these long metal parts downstairs
and I accidentally whacked a guy in the head turning a corner
on the stairway 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!
When I turned fifty and quit having bravery hormones,
I became not only afraid of heights, I also get vertigo 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 a floor board fell off the scaffold
and landed on a guys toes.
Luckily he had on steel toed boots.
Brenny found me and we were handed buckets and 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.
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 would bounce like a trampoline.
I would grab the railings to keep from falling off
but they were loosey-goosey and wiggled
a half foot in either direction.
The sheer terror I was feeling had the disadvantageous effect
of making my safety goggles 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.
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 to the lovely cool concrete sidewalk and gulp as much
fresh air as I could during that half hour.
My career as a construction clean-up artist
took a turn for the better after lunch.
An Albanian gal named Margarita became our lead-person
and we were assigned a luxurious job on the ground.
She was a compact gal in tight black clothing with black
tool belt and tiny black 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 white metal light fixtures.
Margarita trained us to disassemble them, clean them
and reassemble them to meet the IH standards.
IH is the industrial hygienist 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!
At the end of the day we had a debriefing in the huge room
by our foreman, whom Brenda and I hadn't met yet.
We were sitting on overturned buckets side-by-side,
Leaning over, resting our arms on our legs,
with the 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 thirty year old Nicholas Cage and Val Kilmer
had been put in a splice machine.
He looked much better than soot and Brenny whispered,
"He's definitely 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.
I don't know how I got off the scaffolding gig,
but there were enough light fixtures and white cabinets
that needed cleaning to kill a horse.
We got into a rhythm by the third day and felt fairly good
about going to work except for Thursday morning.
I forgot to set my alarm clock.
I was dreaming I had a cleaning crew cleaning my huge
beach house, which doesn't exist in real life,
when Brenny came up to the yard and was calling for me.
She was really talking to my answering machine upstairs.
I woke up and my other clock said 4:50AM and I ran to the
phone and told her to wait on the road.
I jumped in my clothes, flung open the door
and felt the chill 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!
When that job ended, my right arm and shoulder ached
and if I raised my arms my joints
sounded like pop corn popping.
The important thing is that I got to work with my
best friend since 1972, Brenda,
and give Terry HIS allowance.

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