Depending on perspective, I'm either blessed or cursed with a work story that becomes something very cinematic when all its gory details are laid out. Thus the length and attention to specifics in this story is done for the purpose of enhancing a narrative and not to make what happened seem more important, or to act like my situation was worse than someone else's. I know other people have gone through much, much worse. That said...
I used to work for a company that builds sheds in people's yards. We were a three man crew: me, another guy and our foreman. We'd drive to your place with a truck and a big trailer loaded up with supplies, and build you a complete, fully usable shed in a few short hours. The work itself was very fun and I'm proud of what we made, but the job came with glaring downsides, one of which was the extreme hours we worked. We started our workday before the sun rose and at least one day a week, we would not arrive home until after the sun went down that night. These hours, when combined with the physically demanding nature of the job (you're constantly lifting heavy loads, climbing on top of things, battling the heat, etc.), is part of why I don't work for this company anymore.
We didn't only build locally. Some of our customers lived hours away, and we would drive over 100 miles to get to them. This story happened on a day like that. We completed our morning drive and were to spend the day building two sheds in a mountain city.
The first build went fine, I remember it was in a neighborhood of manufactured homes. Three hours labor and we had our shed done. But then we had to go to our second build and the entire day changed.
Most sheds we made stayed within similar dimensions. 6x8, 8x10, maybe 12x12 for a large one. On this particular day, our second build was to be the largest shed we had ever made up to that point: a monolithic 10x20. Bright red with white trim. This build took us from a modest neighborhood, to a wealthy, isolated neighborhood, high in the hills, with rather steep streets and large "mountain cabin" -looking residences.
We reached our destination and the homeowner directed us away from the front of the house, to backtrack a quarter-mile the way we came, until we were to exit the paved road and enter onto a private dirt road that took us along the summit of a ridge, an alley leading to the rear of the house, where the shed would be built. The road was narrow, with houses on one side and the woods on the other. The dirt of the road was loose, unfirm, difficult to grip. Once our truck started driving down this backroad, we had hit the point of no return.
We introduced ourselves to the homeowner in her backyard, she showed us where to build, and we began. This shed was giving us problems from the get-go. The pace of creation just seemed slower than average. A larger shed could take twice as long as a smaller one, and this unsurpassed challenge would probably take even longer than that. I didn't expect to be out of there soon, but I wanted to move faster and I wasn't sure if my co-workers were up for it.
When we made sheds, we had to assure they were level. Usually a quick process. Just place a level on the floor of the shed and insert a couple of shims or a cinderblock if one side is too low. For some reason, this huge shed required excessive work to balance it. We dragged the heavy frame around on the ground, from one place to another. Our foreman had to place a pocket jack under one corner to raise it, and this one corner was very close to the edge of the ridge, with something of a ravine past that edge, making the whole thing into a huge risk if we took a wrong step. Just so much time spent to get it levelled approvably.
None of us came prepared for the weather. We were used to building in the scorching summer heat, and that entire year was unseasonably warm, so the possibility of cold didn't seem to cross our minds, even though this story takes place in autumn, in a higher-altitude environment. But the cold still came that night, steadily decreasing digits as the afternoon became evening. Eventually we were suffering in T-shirts at 43 degrees Fahrenheit as we slogged on.
This shed came with plastic windows which had to be nailed on with a coil nailer. Due to the cold, the plastic had hardened and become brittle. Every nail I shot into the windows caused the plastic to crack loudly, causing hideous damage to the frame, and one nail caused the section it punctured to explode everyhwere, like shrapnel. Freaked me out! These window frames are covered with wooden trim pieces, and after the windows were on, I quickly added the trim pieces to hide something utterly broken underneath.
After the floor frame, floorboards and walls were attached, the rest of the shed was supposed to flow quicker and more naturally. But then I hear my foreman and fellow builder both groaning in dismay. Going over to see what was wrong, he realized: we had installed two of the wall pieces the wrong way. The shed's walls were supposed to fit together like puzzle pieces, and if one piece was wrong, you knew another was also going to be wrong. This was a major, major setback, un-nailing these huge heavy pieces from the shed floor and hand-carrying them across to the other side took another 20-30 minutes easily. We're now becoming physically fatigued, the cold is biting us, the mental frustration of mistakes made is eating at me, and this thing is massive and isn't even close to being finished. Our work day started probably 12 hours ago by this point. How long were we going to be there?!
Trying to be spartan, I continued the best I could and over the next three hours or so, we painstakingly attached the shed's trusses, the roof ply, the rest of the trim, the drip edge (long pieces of metal allowing rainwater to slide off the shed and avoid rotting the structure) and I applied some touch-up paint to the necessary areas. Yet, this was all done at the same slower pace that I had noticed earlier. We couldn't kick anything into high gear because the stress of what we'd been through earlier. Constant struggle was the only thing we had left because we'd bitten off more than we could chew.
More time passed and more work was done. The sun went down and...we found another big mistake. The door hadn't been hung in a very good position. This one was my fault, since installing the doors was something I'd only tried to do a few times. My more experienced coworkers had mercy on me and rearranged the door, and then continued on to the last and most time consuming step: shingling the roof. My foreman only at a later date would instruct me on how to put these on, so for the time being, I just handed him and the other guy packs of shingles and retreated into the warmth of the truck cabin since I was no longer useful and I was just eager to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
This is more minor, but while the roof was being shingled, our foreman received a text message from his girlfriend, telling him there was a huge UFO sighting back home, and back home was far enough away that we weren't able to see it. Such a shame, I've always wanted to see something bizarre like that and extraterrestrials/secret military technologists would have possibly made me forget all about our sorry situation. It was not to be.
Finally, after time had crawled its way to 9:30 at night, the last shingles were placed and this behemoth was DONE. I exited the truck to help pack everything up and we were ready to leave. I thought the worst was over. I was wrong.
You know how I described driving that huge trailer down a backalley road of loose dirt as "the point of no return"? That's wasn't a mere figure of speech. In order to exit the alley and get back onto the neighborhood's paved streets, we had to drive our truck and trailer over an incline of about 15 degrees and 10 feet long. We approached the incline, our foreman floored it, and...the truck's wheels spun in place, no traction. He backed up, and we tried again. The same thing happened, the wheels kicked up the soft dirt of the road without travelling anywhere. We tried a third time and nothing changed. This was insane. This shed had given us more grief than anything we'd made before and now for the finale, our truck was trapped from escaping its vile clutches.
Panic and dread kicks in. It was so late that everyone was asleep and we had no one to call for help. It was up to us alone. For an adrenaline-filled half-hour, we tried everything we could think of to get our trailer over this incline: we tried approaching it at different angles. We made a makeshift ramp out of plywood that we hoped would provide better traction. We briefly considered sawing down a few fully grown ponderosa pinetrees to carve an alternate path, but rejected it as too risky, the timber could fall the wrong way and crush us. We manually tried pushing the trailer over the hill, but it was too heavy for us to get it that far and desparation gave way to defeat. This thing was stuck. At some point, we all accepted the trailer was never going to make it, leaving us only one option: unhitch the trailer and abandon it, drive back home, explain to the company owner what happened, and have someone pick it up the next day. That's what we went with. The trailer DID get removed, God knows how.
And so with no trailer, we left, free at last. We drove the 100+ mile drive back home, a severe frown on my face, my brain pulsating with stress and my eyes glazed over. I had, no contest, completed the absolute worst working day of my entire life. I remember very little talking between the three of us, aside from me making a couple of threats about how things needed to change or I'd have to find another job.
When we got home, we dropped the truck off at our company headquarters and I drove back to my place. When I arrived back, it was, IIRC, 11:00 PM. 17 hours after the day began. Hours and hours of my expectations getting repeatedly violated. That was my workday. So, how was yours?
The cherry on top is that after we arrived home, I told my foreman I wasn't coming in the next day. I would have to be up in less than 6 hours to do all of this again, and I couldn't. I had exhausted myself. So I take the day off to rest and the day after that, when I arrive at work, my boss (above my foreman) tells me that telling the foreman I wasn't coming in wasn't good enough. I need to tell HIM if I wanted time off and that I'd be fired if I made the same mistake again. No expression of sympathy for our situation that I remember, just a minor insult to our injuries.
This all could have been avoided if the relevant parties had known beforehand what they were doing. Before we built for a customer, we'd receive a paper in preparation, where either the customer or a sales representative(I forget which) had to sign off, indicating yes or no, if we were going to have "easy access to the build site". This order was marked "Yes", which means someone had no fucking clue what equipment we were going to be lugging down that difficult dirt alley. I hope whoever it was got reprimanded accordingly for that incompetence. It should have been marked "no" until the alley was made more heavy duty. It could not handle our trailer and we shouldn't have attempted to travel down the alley with it.
Dear God, I will never forget that night. I know where that house is located, and I still remember the customer's name, first and last. All I can say is: Ruby, you'd better be storing the king's gold in that shed for all the shit we had to put up with to get it built!
cringe.
