Perpendicular

Retirement is great.  No doubt about that.  But I can honestly say I loved working as an electrician and I miss some aspects of working on construction sites.

Number one, I miss my coworkers.  My buddies.

I also miss some of the daily silliness we cultivated on the jobsite.

I can illustrate what I am talking about with one of my journal entries.  This is what a wrote on September 17, 1997:

I guess you might say I’m ‘chirpy’ while at work.  I sometimes, for no valid reason, blurt out nonsense as I tour around the jobsite on my way to one place or another.  While you might argue successfully that most all that I say and do at my job is nonsense, the stuff I am referring to is wholesale nonsense.  Sometimes, I simply let out a “whoop” as I whisk by a room where a plumber might be soldering copper pipe or the tin-bender is banging his head against a duct.

I have a litany of phrases I like to blurt as I waddle along.  “It’s a heartache,” I may sing, or, “Go away little squirrel.”

The sprinkler fitter foreman on this latest job is nearly too friendly and an obvious drug abuser.  I like him a lot.  He smokes a pipe, which refuses to stay lit for him, and he stares at the framed walls for a long time before drilling the holes required for his system.  I often walk right up to him, say “perpendicular” with raised eyes, then walk away without another sound.

Much of what I say is participatory.  For example, I regularly yell out “What’s the hub?” and a chorus of my coworkers will reply “Bub” from the various rooms in which they are working.  I might holler out “What’s it all about?” and hear a voice or two answer “Alfie.”  One of my coworkers, a giant man to my short stature, always says “Buddy Little” upon seeing me.  “Buddy Big,” I sing out in response.

I miss that goofy stuff.  My days were better for it.

My 20 pounds of housecat and I just don’t connect on that level.

—Mitchell Hegman