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Honest work
Apr. 21st, 2006 10:55 amThe maintenance manager at my church is a guy named Alex who can fix anything.
I sat in for the church secretary a while back, and every day I'd go home with some story about some odd thing that went wrong. I told the kidlet so many stories about crazy phone calls that now they have a comedy act every time they hear Alex's name: "Alex! A giant hole has opened up in the back lawn!" "Alex! There's a raccoon in the Sunday School building!" "Alex! Somebody spray-painted something on the shed, and none of us know what it means!"
I was working with Alex the year the bed kept breaking, and he had all sorts of suggestions as to how we could fix it. It's a shame my eyes glaze over when anyone utters words like "solder" or "shim" or "machine shop," because I'm sure his way of doing it would have been much faster than mine.
Basically my impression of Alex is that in a post-apocalyptic future, he'd be the one who figured out how to get the water purified and stop the roofs from leaking and stuff like that. Whereas I'd better hope I'm not too old to be a wetnurse, because otherwise I have no other skills and might end up as meat.
Anyway, the newsletter editor asked me to interview Alex for a profile, but I had an oddly difficult time getting him to respond. He wouldn't return phone calls, he wouldn't set a date, he wouldn't do anything until I called in the help of the secretary, who's apparently scarier than I am. But I finally got to do the interview yesterday.
Do you know why Alex didn't want to be interviewed? "Because I'm 31 years old and working as a custodian."
It never ceases to amaze me what people figure they ought to be proud of and ashamed of.
edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns
I sat in for the church secretary a while back, and every day I'd go home with some story about some odd thing that went wrong. I told the kidlet so many stories about crazy phone calls that now they have a comedy act every time they hear Alex's name: "Alex! A giant hole has opened up in the back lawn!" "Alex! There's a raccoon in the Sunday School building!" "Alex! Somebody spray-painted something on the shed, and none of us know what it means!"
I was working with Alex the year the bed kept breaking, and he had all sorts of suggestions as to how we could fix it. It's a shame my eyes glaze over when anyone utters words like "solder" or "shim" or "machine shop," because I'm sure his way of doing it would have been much faster than mine.
Basically my impression of Alex is that in a post-apocalyptic future, he'd be the one who figured out how to get the water purified and stop the roofs from leaking and stuff like that. Whereas I'd better hope I'm not too old to be a wetnurse, because otherwise I have no other skills and might end up as meat.
Anyway, the newsletter editor asked me to interview Alex for a profile, but I had an oddly difficult time getting him to respond. He wouldn't return phone calls, he wouldn't set a date, he wouldn't do anything until I called in the help of the secretary, who's apparently scarier than I am. But I finally got to do the interview yesterday.
Do you know why Alex didn't want to be interviewed? "Because I'm 31 years old and working as a custodian."
It never ceases to amaze me what people figure they ought to be proud of and ashamed of.
edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns