Whitney and I attended the Valentine's dance at the LDS Church that we attend. We were in charge of music, so of course there were plenty of hip-hop songs so we could get our groove on.
Many of the life lesson's I've learned have come from working. During the summer of 2007 I worked for Magleby's Custom Homes with my friend Merrill Madsen. In the end we both determined that construction wasn't for us, but that's another story for another blog post. Each day we would drive up to Wolf Creek Mountain by Heber, UT and work for 8-9 hours. The drive was about an hour and arrived each day on site at 7:00am. Merrill and I were not framers, in fact it seemed that many days we weren't allowed to even pick up a hammer. I was what's know as a "gofer." Or I was the one that was told "Go fer that wood over there," or "Go fer that sledge hammer in trailer." Having owned my own business and worked hard most of my life, I struggled with my new role.
To understand this story it is important to understand the amount of money the land owner had. This man had paid over $20 million for the lot alone, at the very top of the mountain. It was so high up that the construction team was struggling to get the water pumps to work properly because of the change in pressure. This lot would include a home, a care-taker's home (bigger than most the homes I grew up in), a barn, a yurt, a man-made lake, a baseball field, and a snowmobile trail through the woods. Along with these amenities, Russ Taylor, the manager of this job, had talked the owner into building a jeep trail.
Now most jeep trails are made naturally by vehicles traveling over grass so much that two ruts are formed a little wider than a tire width wide. This jeep trail, however, would be fabricated. Before we could put fresh dirt down and seed the middle of the trail, we dug down 2-3 feet to put down varying levels of rock. This rock was sifted from the property itself by a large machine. The sifting machine did not sift out wood and sticks very well, as they most likely seem much like rocks to a sifter.
This jeep trail, 1 foot into the ground, is the setting of my story. Merrill and I had been assigned to pick sticks and wood chunks out of the rocks for 2 days. That's 16 hours of leaning over 50 yards of rocks, sitting on rocks, kneeling on rocks, and hand sifting through rocks to find any wood pieces. The reasoning was that the pieces of wood would disintegrate and cause dips in the jeep trail. I highly doubted that a few sticks here or there would make a difference in the more than two feet of varying sizes of rock in the long run. After two days of working on this jeep trail, I was bored out of my mind and loosing patience with my job.
On day 3, my superiors determined that they wouldn't have work for Merrill and I until later in the day. They once more sent us to the jeep trail to pick out wood. I was upset to say the least. I felt like I could do millions of other jobs besides construction where people would respect my talents and where I could do useful work. As I sat on the pointy rocks in my all-but-worn-out work jeans, some of the excavation guys came over to talk to us. The head excavator hadn't been on site for about 2 weeks because he had been in prison. This didn't really surprise me when I had heard. I knew his lifestyle would eventually lead to incarceration for some extent of time, and that he had already previously served time. For our purposes, we'll call him the "ex-con."
The ex-con came up and immediately started telling us about prison and what it was like this time. I didn't join in the conversation, not having a whole lot of experience with the topic, and also not really wanting to talk or smile for that matter. The ex-con noticed my unusual silence and he said,
"How's the jeep trail com'n?"
"It's okay. I'm kind of tired of picking out sticks though. We've been at it two days."
"Easy money man! That's a sweet job."
I noticeably grimaced. He saw my grimace and fixed his eyes on me with cold stare. He proceeded to cuss me out. He called me every name in the book for thinking I was above the work and for being such a sourpuss. I immediately picked my head up and smiled to show him I wasn't above picking up sticks and to get in his good graces again. But in my head, I still hated the work.
Today I think about that story and immediately think of a time when a little more optimism would have helped me out a lot. The ex-con may have gone about it differently than most people I've worked with in life, but he taught me to enjoy what I do and do it well. I'm not saying that we should all go after "easy money," because I don't think that's exactly what Mr. Ex-Con meant. I feel like he was saying that I should make the best of every situation. If all you can do is pick up sticks, do it in a way so that no one can ever doubt who you are or how hard you can work.
I don't know what happened to this excavator, but I do know that I won't soon forget the lesson he taught me in his rough language about being optimistic in any job is required of me.
Optimism Exported.
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