it's hard to type with tattered hands
Spent the better part of today doing one of my least favorite things, making extension cords. My fingers are all shredded from twisting wires and hands are all hacked up from razor blades and screwdriver heads gouging into them and at one point I managed to stab one thin copper wire well under my thumbnail. Fun stuff.
Today reminded me of one of my favorite days with the BNW, while they were moving into Calhoun Square I was given the crap job of making some 400-odd feet of cable* into several dozen lengths of extension cord and sat in the basement of the 2605 building for an entire spring day twisting blood into the wires and happily making cables until Sweeney found me there. I remember he wished he could compensate me somehow for my work and all I said was that he should set one the BNW letter jackets aside for me since I was going to have one someday. It was a weird turning point.
The situation these days is strangely almost-reversed since I'm the guy putting together the space and there are people pulling more than their fair share all around us. Like the BNW back then we depend a great deal on how much people are willing to do and I wish very much that I could compensate people with more than my thanks. But some days the best thing I can do is taking the shit jobs for myself. Once again I'm happy to do it, just for different reasons.
* I was also tasked with getting 2605 ready for the move back from Calhoun Square and found more than 350 feet of extension cables in the ceiling, most of them plugged into nothing - meaning that all my work years earlier had been an absolute waste of time. But I'm not bitter.
1 comment:
Sometimes the boring terrible jobs are the best ones, because they're so comforting in their misery.
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