MARTY, get to work on this blog!

Category: dribblings

i don’t paint much anymore because it’s hard to work it in my liberry shedule.  but today i helped my dad and mark paint. they are working at this house deep in the nether regions of southside. it’s an area of southside i’ve never seen before, and i don’t know a single person who could afford to build/buy over there. and it’s not even riverfront.

anyway, it’s a new house but the part i was painting is an unfinished basement type situation that they are turning into a “media room”. basically they’re building a theater area. this is the second one of these i’ve painted in the last 3 months. it must be THE thing to have now. i hate it because black walls and ceilings are very disorienting. it’s just me? well. whatever.

but it’s all new construction and there is a crew there at work. meaning: i’m the only girl on the scene.

i hate being around a construction crew. you’d think i hate it because i’m usually refered to as Girl, but that’s not even the main reason. i hate it because it’s loud and it’s full of meatheads. today, the meatheads actually called me Painter instead of Girl, so that was nice. however, other than that, it was typical meathead contract work. all of the regular characters were there:

1. The Contractor. He’s usually an asshole. He does NOTHING physical and he just barks at the workers and tells them their work is crap. And the one i worked with today was a dick. he treated his workers like dogs. i thought for a minute he was going to tell me that i was painting something wrong and i actually had a whole stream of curse words and swears ready for him. Lucky for him, he left me alone.

2. The Whistler. you know it. there is at least ONE of these on every crew. they whistle. loudly. it’s usually a tuneless whistle. no real song at all. at one point i thought i heard a few notes of “Little Brown Jug” but it quickly went back to a nothing song.

3. The Singer. oh yes. it’s not bad enough to have Whistle Guy butchering your eardrums with sonic warfare, nay, there’s always a singer as well. sometimes The Whistler and The Singer are the same guy. It was not so with this crew. on this crew The Singer was much like The Whistler in that the songs he sang were not songs at all. it was things like, “gotta FIIIIND that bucket!” and his favorite (i’m assuming, because he sang it the most): “pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, up, up!” to the tune of the William Tell Overture.

4. The Whipping Boy. there’s usually one guy, most likely he’s the New Guy, (the new guy may not be that new, he may have worked on the crew for a year or more, but still, he’s the New Guy.), and he gets blamed for everything. the Whipping Boy on this crew’s name was Marty. i know this because i heard Marty’s name being screamed across the two rooms we were working in apporximately once every 30 seconds.

“MARTY. get in there and hold up that chair rail.”

“okay.”

“MARTY. where are the nails for the nail gun?”

“they’re over by-”

“bring them to me, MARTY.”

“okay, i’ve got the chair rail first-”

“MARTY. get a bucket.”

“MARTY go cut that trim.”

then, MARTY made a fatal mistake. he miscut the piece they needed, and they jumped on him like a pack of lions on a wounded antelope.

“MARTY how could you DO THAT?”

“MARTY, i gave you the right measurements, MARTY.”

“you know what this means MARTY. three strikes and you’re out, MARTY.”

and i wanted to jump in and defend him because it was easy to see that the reason MARTY miscut the piece is that when he was given the measurements for the piece, before he could get to the saw 3 people called him over to do three separate things, and THEN he went and cut the piece to small. if they had left the poor idiot to finish one task before yelling out another 2 tasks, everything would have been fine. and i SO wanted to point that out to the dickhead contractor.

but i didn’t. not because i’m a coward, heavens no. but because i knew that if i, the Girl Painter, had stepped in to defend MARTY, it would have been like cutting off MARTY’s penis. and for the rest of his life, with that crew, any time MARTY would get in trouble SOMEONE would be all, “whats the matter, MARTY, your Girl Painter not hear to defend you?” or something neanderthal like that.

so i remained neutral, an observer, like the camera operator on a nature documentary. i watched the meatheads eat one of their own. i’m not proud, mind. i’m just telling you how it was.

5. The Guy Who Questions Everything. he is a menace. he’s always asking questions, but not actually doing much work. on this crew he was also:

6. The Guy Who Yells Out Measurements. This guy is an ass because he knows at any time someone is trying to keep two measurements in their head long enough to make it to the saw and cut the piece the right size. he knows this, and STILL he keeps yelling out measurements to things that aren’t even ready to be cut yet.

it was five hours of that shit.

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