We are working a few locations at once, because that’s just how the brick-laying business goes I guess.
One particular location seems to be cursed, however, as Friday presented a situation that proved to be semi-catastrophic, yet slightly comedic perhaps, in certain contexts…
The word is, that one of the construction dudes at the job site bent over near a propane heater, causing his pants to catch fire. He was loaded into the ambulance with his pants completely burned off, screaming in pain, skin hanging from his rear-end. While I thought it sounded tragic and disturbing, a couple of our guys seemed pretty entertained by the story.
Anyway, I was selected to work at the same cursed location today. We were working among a 6-foot scaffold set-up to complete a 12-foot wall. I naturally feel like I’m going to fall off of anything above the height of 4-feet, but our brick-layers seem to be completely invincible to heights-related fears.
So today, one of our dudes was finishing the top row of bricks, and needed a little boost, via cinder block, as you can see in the following cellphone photo:
I heard a loud thud (him falling off the brick onto the scaffold), and looked up in time to see him gracefully roll off the planks, and float down to the ground in a slow-motion spin, landing on his side with a calm surrendering splendor.
Long silence. Then all I could say was:
“Dude. Are you okay?”
As if woken from a nap, he looks around to process why the bricks are up there, and why he’s way down here.
We were all a little weirded out for a second, thinking of worst-case scenarios and all that. But when he got on the phone to tell one of his buddies what had happened, I had to try really hard not to laugh, for context reasons.
