Day 308: Where he belongs

The morning sun shone through the grating in the tool displays, and the door was left open onto the grounds. We worked through the morning, the sounds of drilling and assembling, the hum of the small portable radio, filling the hall. At lunch we ate sandwiches on the grass in the sun, and some of us sat on the cold metal fence, and we looked away at the edge of the sky where mist became void, or down at our phones.

The sales team arrived in the afternoon and began unloading the products from their boxes and arranging them on the displays. We built the headers on the floor and lifted them into place above the displays that had been finished. When there were holes in the wood we screwed through the holes. When there weren’t holes we drilled holes that we could use. We lifted walls for the screens and kept them in place with supports, and screwed two-by-one to them to take the weight of the light boxes as two of us held them up and two of us screwed them in. Sawdust fell through the air and the sun caught the particles of dust and the particles glowed.

I assembled the crosswire but I was slow and I felt clumsy. I couldn’t get the drill into the crosswire at the right angle and I couldn’t get the sections of crosswire to line up. Steve worked rapidly, adroitly, a man where he belonged. He hooked his drill to the back of his belt when he was not using it with the lazy precision of a pro. He kept a pencil behind his ear and measured and marked lines for the supports, sometimes with a spirit gauge, sometimes by eye. He gave John and me little jobs to do, then stood in the hall conferring with his father about the next step, the pieces that had broken in Notts’ van, whether we were on schedule, the myriad problems and solutions and concerns to be teased out.

Low-level anxiety whispering through the room, always the possibility that they don’t get done, that something they’ve plotted on their CAD program doesn’t work in real life, that a joint cracks, a support gives, that those light boxes fall and take down many thousand pounds of equipment. So much riding on getting so many things right, and they’ve done it successfully five hundred times before, never failed yet, but every time is different, and every time holds that potential for catastrophe.

Yet Steve saunters and jokes and entertains the others, rides the anxiety with ease. He works quickly, but carefully, attentively, assiduously, through the morning and the afternoon, and tomorrow, and the day after, and most of his days alive on Earth.

You see him plod into the pub halfway through your dreary shift and you moan to him about how awful your day has been, and he nods and asks you for Stella, and you look at him and you have no idea.

Here is a man who is an expert at working, a man who moves smoothly and successfully through the working day. He is to be applauded, respected, he is right where he belongs. Get him his pint. He has earned it.