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)