The Why's and Wherefore's

We had worked on these people's addition for a few weeks, and had done all the framing we could do for these people who were habitually changing their minds, and soon, we'd be tearing out what we had just done to redo it in some new formation that these homeowners had pulled right out of their asses. As a matter of fact, the builder they had started with quit (if you asked him) or had been fired (if you asked them) out of frustration. My boss took the job, it was, after all, work.

Anyway, eventually everyone got called away to start a real house somewhere else, but I got left behind with a guy named Tracy, and old man (I'm his age now--shit!) who was one of the slowest and laziest people I have ever met--myself included. And he stood there with the homeowner's wife (the husband was off making millions selling A.L. Williams Ins. during the day) while she praised him on a job well done.

I couldn't take it anymore and got up off my knees where I'd been working and walked over to them and interrupted.

"You know, it was a collaborative effort," I said, and her jaw dropped so fast that at first, I thought that she couldn't believe I had spoken to the all mighty homeowner, but that wasn't it.

"That's a big word!" she gasped at me. And then, for another moment, I wondered if she knew what it meant. "How is it you know a word like that?" she asked me.

I was surprised that she'd be surprised. It never occurred to me that carpenters were expected to be dumbasses. And that's a "syndrome" I've dealt with many times over the years and even named this web log after the notion.

I was reminded again when someone posted a picture of a vanity license plate with pi shown in eight characters and one of my friends thought enough of me to tell me the numbers were indeed pi. And I reckon you couldn't blame this person--everyone knows I dislike math though I consider it a dark art.

But the fact of the matter is, I use math quite a bit when building. Not the pencil to paper kind, but the kind that involves pencil to wood. The kind where what's-his-name's theory about the hypotenuse of a right triangle becomes a rafter in a system whose intervals are guided by a 16 base system--I think. It's all very mathiesque albeit empirical.

I just wish things hadn't changed so I could still brag about having found something that I liked to do for a living so I could say that I don't work for a living. And every now and then I'd get to impress someone who thought every carpenter was a dumbass with a funny one-liner--usually the final invoice!