Shop Quotes

Here in the shop we have developed a unique way of communicating. It began with different people using funny movie quotes and as evolved into our own list of what we call shop quotes. Here is a list of a few, although most have invented from particular experiences, you should still get the idea.

Go to Hell Nate!
Were you home schooled?
It’s not your baby, but you can love it like it is.
Can I have the day off to visit my brother in jail?
Nate, Earmuffs!
Measure my fingers
I’m the only one that does anything around here.
Stop touching my nipples!
Medic!
Why is my tape measure in the freezer?
Put your pants back on.
Don’t Look at this Nate.
I don’t care if they hurt. Get your hands out of your pants.
Where’s Jeremy?
He's just a Boy.

Something We Would Like to Try.

Chad's Can

We each have our own "chores" that we take care of at the shop. You see we are not a large company that can afford to have sexy women come in and clean the place for us. We have to take care of it ourselves. Each week, which really means about once a month, we decide who will do which chore. To decide this we use very scientific and complex algorithms. Okay, who am I kidding, we don't even know what algorithms are. We either draw straws, pick a chore out of a hat, the person with most seniority chooses first, or whatever the Ouija board tells us to do. There are four different chores that we take care of in the shop. They are cleaning the shop bathroom, cleaning the kitchen/conference room/Chad's office/break room (yes it is all the same room), cleaning the office bathroom, and cleaning the staging area. The most desirable job is cleaning the office bathroom because no one really uses it so it doesn't get very grimy. The least desirable job is cleaning the shop bathroom. That bathroom gets used quite a bit. In a usual day Blake alone will use that bathroom at least five times. Have I mentioned that Blake is gay? What is interesting about cleaning the multi-purpose room is that random things pile up there each month. You may find a hinge or two lying around, scraps of wood, woodworking magazines, and of course what every shop full of guys needs - the monthly subscription to Maxim magazine. When we clean that room, there is a corner of the room we don't clean; that would be Chad's corner of paradise. We don't want to mess up his feng shui. His corner has a certain aura about it, of course another word for it could be cluttered. To the untrained eye, it looks like a messy pile of papers and maybe a Diet Coke here and there sitting next to the half full 7-11 Big Gulp. Now I must interject here, Chad is a quirky fellow. How can you not like cooked apples and not be quirky? There is a special place in Chad's corner that becomes a work of art as the month progresses. That would be Chad's can. No, we are not talking about his derriere; I am talking about his trash can. His trash can is one of those small trash cans that most of you are sitting next to right this minute in your offices. As the month progresses the trash begins to pile up in his can. A normal person might empty the garbage once it is full; not Chad. Chad seems to derive enjoyment by seeing how tall he can get the trash without it toppling over. He has perfected it to an art form. Most people wouldn't be able to pull off the amazing balancing acts that Chad performs each month with his trash can. Sometimes we secretly add trash to his "masterpiece" to see if he notices that something is amiss. In conclusion Chad's can has become his red Swingline stapler; something he cannot live without, it has become his bosom buddy and will forever be.

If You Haven't Seen It Yet . . . Here It Is

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A Blog About? . . . . . Well Nothing I Guess

So I am sitting here trying to think of what I can write about. I never thought I would be in this position, wondering what to blog about, I didn’t even know what a blog was six months ago, let alone how to set one up, and now I am writing one. Who came up with the name blog anyway, it sounds like something dirty or illegal, when I was a kid if I told my mom I was blogging she probably would have started crying and called my bishop, thinking it was a new way to get high or something. Now you hear it everywhere, “hey check out my blog”, “have you seen my blog?” for a while I thought people were coming on to me. Now I know better, I am with the times, I am an expert blogger, and I can post a blog without any help, well almost without help. So why do we write blogs? Why do people even care about what other people are doing? For me it just gives me a reason to hate people for having fun without me. No, I really don’t hate anyone, but why doesn’t anyone think of inviting me on their vacations or asking me to come over when their baby is taking its first steps, come on I have feelings too. I am just kidding I don’t care about your baby, but I do like vacations. So seriously what possesses people to sit down and write about themselves? Is it boredom? Is it a feeling of responsibility to their “fans”? Maybe it is because of peer pressure from friends? I don’t know, but I do know that for me it isn’t any of these, I think it is more self serving than that. I am probably more entertained doing this than the people who read it. We laugh more at the shop about this stuff than anybody else ever will, I am sure of it. Of course I can’t speak for Chad, Jeremy, or Nate but I am pretty sure they have a similar motivation. Oh and of course fame and fortune is always a good motivator. So we will probably keep writing on our little blog even after our wives decide to stop reading it because hey if it makes us laugh then I guess it is worth it, even without the fame and fortune. But whatever reason you have to write in a blog or even not to write in a blog, you just keep being you, because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it people like you. Ok maybe not everyone likes you but you think what you need to so you can sleep at night.

The Temp

There is something out of the ordinary going on at the shop these days. When I say these days I mean for the past week or so, you see we have a “temp”. He is not your ordinary temp; he is not some guy we found at a temp agency, he has actually been working for “the boss” longer than anyone else here. I guess to explain our temp I must dive a little deeper into what it is we actually do here. If you haven’t figured it out yet we build furniture, cabinets, and other wooden things here at the shop, but what you probably don’t know is that the majority of the stuff we build goes into houses that “the boss” builds. So we spend a lot of time at the job site where these houses are built, we do a lot of installations, we deliver stuff, and sometimes we just go up to clean or do some other task the boss has for us like, ”move that rock 2 feet that way”. Well, at the job site is a man we lovingly refer to as “the painter”. What does “the painter” do at the job site? Yes you guessed it, he paints. Now these houses are not your average houses, they are million dollar houses, so they don’t get painted in a weekend, it is an ongoing process from the time sheetrock is up until the house is finished, so the painter is pretty much there every time we are, and because of this we have come to know him pretty well. We really enjoy the painter because he is always angry. We don’t know why he is always angry but he just is. He is always yelling, sometimes he is just singing along to his oldies country music but most of the time he is sarcastically yelling at someone, otherwise known as complaining. We’re pretty sure the years of breathing paint fumes are getting to his head but it could just be numerous prescription meds that he consumes.
So anyway he has come to work at the shop for a while finishing some carvings we have been making for the current house we are building. So now, we have a very loud and grumpy old man working with us. There is one thing that we have found about the painter that has become somewhat entertaining. He scares very easily, I mean very easily. You walk into the room where he’s working and say “Hi” and it’s like you just shocked him with a defibrillator. He yells a long incomprehensible Middle Eastern chant and grasps his heart like he’s going to die. Although we sometimes think this might kill him, we have found that it is very fun. We’re not sure how long he will be here, maybe until the job is done or maybe we will kill him first, regardless, a fun time will be had by all.

So “temp” here is your love, it’s not much but it is all we could come up with for a grumpy old painter trying to keep the hope alive. (see comments under previous “Nicknames” blog)