I sat at the bar watching golf. Behind me, three general contractors who swore a lot, talking about their jobs. I thought about saying something. I pictured how I’d do it. But after listening to them for a while, like the whole time I was there, I felt sorry for them. They needed to swear. The tone of the dialogue shifted and one said (this is just between us), he said he’d gone to his doctor because of how he was feeling, what he’d read in Men’s Health, and his doctor said he was over-worked and had too much stress, that was the problem. He said he’d been a contractor all his life (he looked about 40). They talked about the different trades and how you need to bring everyone together as a team and give good estimates and not just go for the bottom dollar or something…they were getting drunk and pissed off. I wanted to join in, to say I’d worked around construction too and the project management, and I thought I could relate. I wanted them to get out of that work. The one guy said, I feel like I’m never ahead, I can never catch up…there’s always another bid to go after or email I should be doing or, I don’t know…I imagined he was right, he would never catch up. Always another project. Here they were with me in some stupid Mexican bar in Redmond in the back swearing, with me watching golf. But I didn’t really understand them and they wouldn’t, me. I had a posh job, a white collar job, of Visio charts and PowerPoint decks and pretty MBA grads in the break rooms. I’d seen my job through the eyes of guys like them and they wanted mine but saw it was unattainable, and I’m not sure how I’d ever attained it myself. I wanted them to have a chance to start over but knew the chances were, they wouldn’t.

Categories: musings, prose

Tags: Bukowski, postaday, prose, William Pearse writer, work-life balance