Day 1: Orientation

Today we have been officially tagged as "young pups."

Starting a new job can sometimes be difficult. I mean, it's hard for me to leave Allen's Camera, after having worked there for just over a year. But I'm basically getting screwed over, making only $6/hr and working just as many hours a week as I was during high school when I had 4 AP classes and very little time for work. However, I am leaving and moving on to bigger and better things...namely: construction.

A job that was advertised as "Light General Labor" has transformed before my very eyes today, into something of a huge undertaking. What I felt assured would be a good day's work, yet still not too intense, became something very different as I sat in the orientation room this morning at 6am.

Brady Rice, Quinn Robbins, Skye Larsen and I all applied for work, which we all deemed appropriate for a summertime job. What was advertised as 40 hrs/week + 15-20 hrs/week overtime, evolved into 60 hrs/week (Monday - Saturday) faster than we could blink, during our first interview. We were all hired, of course, as Aerotek seemed unusually happy to have us aboard.

The highlight of my week was peeing in a cup, awkwardly enough. It was the first drug test I'd been required to partake in, and I admit, it was an enlightening experience. I got yet another witness to the stupidity of drugs and those who do them. To urinate in a little cup is demeaning enough, but to actually go through that all and test positive for drugs...that's just sad. I'd hate to be caught that way...through my urine. I'd much rather go down in some sort of heroic and rebellious manner, clutching my cigarette as the police haul me off the to slammer...or something like that. Not that I would ever smoke or use any sort of drug...I'm against that. It's just that peeing in a cup seems like the loser's-way-out.

Anyway, the four of us show up today, bright and early, groggy-eyed and wondering when the next break would be. We sat down in the front row, and were issued a hard hat and safety goggles, which we promptly put on. We must have looked pretty goofy up there in the front (obviously sucking up) with our hard hats and safety glasses, ready to sit there for three hours and listen to a guy tell us all about safety. The room was full of experienced veterans of construction, averaging about 35-40 years in age. You could tell that these men were going to hate us by the end of the summer...in fact, I wasn't too sure that they didn't already hate us. We were laughing and joking around, just enjoying ourselves the whole morning. I mean, we really must have looked as though we had no idea what was about to happen--and I honestly still don't, cause I had to leave early to get to my other job (Allen's) for one of my last days.

They gave us this book, put out by Hoffman, about safety around the workplace. It had all kinds of stuff, but we found a couple interesting pages with drawings, and since we're graduated, we're going to avoid reading as much as is humanly possible. One page had the hand signals for communicating with a Boom Operater. We quizzed each other on the different signals, just for fun. Thumbs-up meant Raise Boom, Thumbs-down meant Lower Boom, Rotating your hand in a circle with your index finger pointing up meant to Raise Load, the opposite indicated that we wanted the load lowered. There were some other weird ones that meant some other crazy stuff. Anyway, we messed around with that a while before the Orientation started.

Partway through the orientation the speaker, Michael, started to talk about misconduct, and horseing around--you know, how it is prohibited and stuff--and the following scene occured:

Michael: Now if you walk in and start messing around someone's gonna drop the boom on ya.
Me and Quinn: ::thumbs down::

I could only assume he was using some jargon, rather than referring to an actual boom, but whatever. We giggled about it, though, as it was funny at the time. You know that point at about 1am, when you and your friends are so dang tired, that everything anyone says is extremely funny, and laugh at the stupidest things? I usually refer to it as "laugh point." Anyway, I think that if you wake up early enough, laugh point can actually occur in the early hours of the morning, rather than late at night. We sure were close, if anything.

I think that the hardest task I had to deal with today was where on my helmet I should place my Hoffman sticker. I didn't actually see any action, like my peers. I've been sitting at Allen's all day, wondering what happened. I actually just heard from Quinn that the work is pretty hard, but at the same time...not. The impression that I got from the orientation was that the "Light General Labor" that we signed up for was actually hard-core, real-life construction. Like, this is the real deal...the big time. From what Quinn described, it's not that bad...but you never know what tomorrow holds in store.

I just pray that this doesn't turn out to be some huge Civil War situation, where the young and innocent teenagers sign up, thinking that it would be kinda fun to see some action, and that anything is better than sitting at home doing nothing. The last thing I'd want is to find out, like those boys who ran off to sign up for the army to have an adventure, that this is something much bigger than any of us ever could have expected. No, wait...I guess the last thing I'd want to happen is that I get killed like most of those boys did...the other thing would probably second to last.


Quote of the Day:

"Yeah, they told us that our number-one priority is to be safe...and our number-two priority is to get paid...so I'm just gonna go and stand around, and when they ask me what I'm doing, I'll tell them that I'm staying safe and getting paid, and that's all I need to worry about."
-Quinn