Reliability is a two edged sword.

So I don’t mean to brag on myself here, but I’m a pretty hard worker. I bust my ass, and I do a damn good job at whatever I happen to be doing for money. I suppose the home-type work is a lot slacker and usually involves loud music, a casual pace, and frequent breaks to eat/sleep/check internet addictions. And It often doesn’t get finished in one sitting, no matter how small the task. But at work, I keep up a hard pace and I turn out quality results.

There are good and bad things about having a good work ethic. First off, there’s the good old intangible self satisfaction of doing a good job. I know this sounds very Leave-It-To-Beaver, but I do feel better about myself after doing a good job than I do after slacking off or leaving a half assed job for a customer to look at and sigh, and cluck their tongues, and wag their mental fingers at my product in shame. Secondly, there’s the much more tangible result of having your boss recognize your work, praise you for it, lord it over your slack ass coworkers shitty work to their faces, and hook you up with a sweet raise when your evaluation comes around. And I’ve got one of the best bosses ever, so he really does thank me for doing a good job. This is a new and invigorating experience for me, seeing as most of my previous bosses were, how you say, ballands. Before this job, my hard work was, at worst, recognized by a taser to the face followed by a purple nurple and an Indian burn, and at best by the occasional, “keep it up”.

There are however some down sides to working hard. The most obvious would be the fact that you actually have to work hard all the time. And hard work isn’t easy, so that sucks. Also, when you work harder than the people around you, you set a standard for yourself that you are expected to keep up all the time. Doesn’t matter if you are sick, or hungover, or just plain tired, you’d better be getting stuff done, or the boss man will notice. Fortunately for me, I have the sort of job where when I’m too tired I can just tell my boss to fuck off and leave me alone, and he usually will. We construction types cuss like pirates, and generally understand the occasional slow pace in the morning time.

The last, and most annoying down side to working hard is that whenever something needs to be done extra fast, or especially well, or some higher than average standard needs to be met, you are the one who gets called on to do so. Reliability is a two edged sword, and that bitch is sharp.

Let me illustrate by spinning a yarn from earlier today. Tomorrow our road tech is going out to do some really easy work that requires two men, but will be a piece of cake. I did not get sent out with him because my boss wants to get as much as possible done in our yard to catch up from the four day weekend. Hey no big deal, I like working in the yard better anyway. I don’t have to hang out with the dorky road tech, go me. But Thursday, there’s a killer service call all the way out at the beach, two hours away at least. And it will take all day to finish with two men. So I get chosen to go with him on that job because my boss knows I will bust ass and finish as quick as possible. But this means I have to get picked up from my home at five o’clock in the morning, the butt crack of dawn. Nay, before the butt crack of dawn, which is at six thirty, when I usually wake up. And I have to ride all the way to the beach in a van that smells like swamp balls, with an anime fan who stinks like his wife hasn’t discovered soap, with a ladder on top that emits a skull shaking tone as the wind whips through it. It’s like a headache machine. A sadistic evil headache machine. And when we get there, I have to work from seven-ish to somewhere between four and six, and then drive another two hours back, unload the van, and drive home from there. This means I could very well be working a fifteen hour day. Damn my stupid work ethic for making me get assigned jobs like this!

And here’s the best part: I get to spend these fifteen hours with an uberdork. Let me just say, he’s a serious Christian. Now before you go getting your chastity belts twisted, I realize there are some Christians who aren’t dorks. But y’all often do have a tendency to get a little Ned Flanders-ish. Admit it. It’s ok to be like Ned Flanders, it’s just kind of annoying for everyone else. With that established, he likes to edit his language all the time. So he goes around saying such phrases as, “man that crap was messed up” and “Who the heck fixed this junk.” Stop it please, you sound retarded. Just cuss like everyone else in our entire industry or go teach a daycare. No joke, we all think that stuff is fraggin dumber than poo you weiner headed fracktard. Of course when he gets pissed off, he cusses just like everyone else, but then he apologizes like we’re the fucking pope and we care or something. And he has the balls to complain about our music having too much profanity, but he listens to video game theme songs. No shit, like the sound track to virginity. Does it get any more annoying than two hours of the score from Final Fantasy? Answer: hell no.

He’s also a serious video game freak. He plays World of Warcraft all the time. And not only that, but he insists on talking about it in public. Seriously Joe, nobody cares how much you hate gnomes. Likewise, please refrain from informing us about any and all farming/weapons/magic attacks/magical items/magic in general/guild news/or absolutely anything about World of Warcraft as a whole. You can play it if you really wnat to, just never tell us about it. And don’t get me started on the anime thing. Dear lord, why? He’s literally got hundreds of anime movies. If you aren’t familiar with anime, just imagine the worlds laziest animator teaming up with a cast of mentally retarded translators and voice actors, to make a movie about something only a Japanese lunatic with Alzheimer’s could possibly conceive. Gahhhhh, I hate anime!

And on top of that he never lifts his feet off the ground when he walks, he constantly complains about how pussy whipped he is, and he talks about church all the time. Dude, how many times must I tell you, I’m never, ever, ever going back. You can do whatever you want, but I think the odds of going to hell are actually higher if you go to church. I mean, God never goes, why should I? And he can’t think about more than one thing at a time. He asks the same question four or five times before he remembers what you told him, and if anything at all, like keys for instance, distracts him, he immediately forgets whatever you just said and completely screws up whatever he was doing. In the last week he 1) almost burnt down our office by hooking up electricity completely wrong after being reminded FIVE times to do it a certain way, (seriously, we only caught the outlet melting and beginning to smoke a few minutes before we all left), 2) did the exact same thing the next day, except I checked behind him, and 3) spewed freezing water all over one of our coworkers because he thought he had turned the water off, but was in fact just an idiot.

And apparently the woman who runs this place we’re fixing is incredibly demanding and stands there whilst you work offering helpful, yet completely ignorant suggestions on how you should be doing your job. I don’t do well with that sort of thing. I tend to freak out and rant, if you haven’t noticed. Also, I cuss a lot, and I burp, fart, and tell vulgar yet entertaining stories while I work. Please wish me luck as I try to not only keep my job, but refrain from punching someone in the ovaries. Maybe I’ll luck out and she will at least be hot, but in the construction industry, the odds are pretty slim. (and of course by slim, I don’t mean in some sort of thin attractive way, I mean in the overweight, mannish, bull dyke sort of way)