One of those odd professional moments happened yesterday when I worked on a job from start to finish. I have been there for the opening and the closing but never for both on the same job. This particular job took five months, a bit longer than the eight to ten weeks I was originally told. The last few weeks were rough. I miss my home. I have lived in this house for a year less a week and I have been working out of town for seven months. I couldn’t find a mixing bowl the other day. I had no idea where we kept them.
Luckily the site itself was quite good. There weren’t any serious arguments and no one really failed to get along. That’s not to say it was perfect. We got the “the site is going to disappear so you better be done” about a month ago with no real heads up and a bunch of work to complete on the roof, in winter, beside Lake Huron. Thanks to a “why the hell didn’t we get this earlier” bit of overtime on Tuesday we pulled it off.
The other fringe benefit to working the same site for five months is that I gained a +5 proficiency to working with fire wrap. While the others were slaving away on the roof I was working like a madman inside the building. When I gained an apprentice I realized that my speed was substantially higher than I thought it was and I could just yell out measurements for odd sized spots without having to spend much time thinking about them.
I’m still going to be working out of town for a bit. I’m headed back to Burlington. The boss offered me the chance to take a lay-off and see if anything pops up in my direction but I’m not a gambler. Hell, I’m barely out of being a late adopter of technology (my phone is fancy although it did take me ten years before I upgraded).