Thursday, December 04, 2003

Did I shave my legs get a Master's for this?

So I spent the day today helping lay insulation in someone's house. The obvious question is: What the fuck does that have to do with Electrical Engineering? The obvious answer is: nothing.

Yeah, things are still slow at work, so one guy who does the same work I'm (maybe someday going to be) doing decided to take the day off to insulate his house, and he tapped me to help. Since they were willing to give me a paid day off at work, I was like, what the hell. I'll do it.

Mistake.

If you've ever laid insulation in a house, you know how badly the process sucks. If you've never done it, don't. And don't contract any of your friends to help, either, because you won't have friends for long if you do.

Okay, it wasn't all that horrible. I just rather would have been sitting on my ass at my desk instead. My job today was to feed the insulation spraying machine with insulation while my co-worker was upstairs actually spraying the shit. So I'm sitting there in the cold garage with a runny nose and fogged up goggles staring down 40 packages of fiberglass insulation. 40 packages might not seem like so much. Except that it is. As if just the sheer number of packages wasn't enough, they pack this shit tighter than a 12-year-old girl. So, when you split open a package of insulation, it accordions out to about 2-3 times its original volume.

Then there's the fact that fiberglass is about the most evil fucking shit ever created. Where the hell are the HVAC engineers? Why can't they come up with something less fucked up than GLASS in FIBER form that's effective and cheap as a home insulator? Couldn't they just make the whole goddamn house out of Thermos or something? I mean, even with some safety glasses and a surgeon's mask, that fiberglass shit is bound to find its way into your eyes and onto your skin at some point. This left me, for awhile, feeling a bunch of little pricks on various parts of my body. And for once those pricks weren't the penises of 10-year-old boys.

About halfway through, I realized the guy would probably take me out to dinner, so it wouldn't be that bad. And I decided immediately that we would be going out for Kroff sushi dinner. There's this place here in town that I've been wanting to hit ever since I moved in, and so I decided to take advantage of things if given the opportunity.

So, yeah, I got paid for doing something nowhere near related to my job, and I got a free sushi meal out of it, so it's okay. Still, though, it's only adding to my feelings of being fucking worthless at my job, which already puts me where I was at my last two jobs. So at least I've been here before. As I've been bullshitting for weeks, however, things should pick up at some point and you'll eventually hear me complaining about how I'm working too much and feeling a little too useful. In essence.

This also had one other intangible benefit, as it shows that my job has one thing I love: scheduling flexibility. Since I've been showing up between like 10 and 11 AM most days with no one giving a fuck, I was pretty sure things would be okay on this front. Today's activities cemented that feeling.

Oh, and hey, I think I totally deserve an award for slipping in not one, but two pedophile jokes into this post.

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