Today started by me having to be up at the shop at 6:00 a.m. to meet a customer who’d borrowed tooling from our roll forming machine for a job at a solar farm up in northeast Texas. So John and I put our roll former back together to have it ready to haul out to a job today.
Saul got to work a little after 7:30 and he and I headed out to Jonestown to roll metal panels at a new construction job site.
Unfortunately our timeline was thwarted by a bad accident on 1431. I was trying to find out what had happened by way of social media and when I came up empty, I texted my friend Mike who is a firefighter and he informed me that it was a bad motorcycle accident and the rider wasn’t wearing a helmet.
An hour and a half later, 1431 was reopened and Saul and I headed out the last few miles to get to the site. The site was on the side of a cliff out in the hills between Lago Vista and Jonestone, so navigating the narrow gravel road to get there was a bit of a white-knuckler.
We were 3 hours later than our intended time to start working, but we made fairly quick work of it. We rolled 3,000 linear feet of 24 gauge standing seam roof panels. Just Saul and me. We lugged panels ranging from 11 feet to 17 feet from the back of the roll former to the house’s garage. We both lugged upwards of 3,000 pounds each between the panels and custom trim we fabricated for this customer.
It’s hard work, but it’s good, honest work. It’s not back-breaking labor, but it’s labor. It’s fun work. I get my fair share of desk work, but just the right amount of being on the road and being on site to roll custom-cut standing seam panels that are going on a structure’s roof.
I really, really enjoy this job.
It took Saul and me an hour and a half to run 3,000 feet of steel coil out in the high hills of Central Texas.
Saul and I have our respective language barriers, but we figure it out and we have fun. We talk a lot. His English is a lot better than my Spanish, but I’m really trying. I’m always asking him how to say things, and if I need to convey something technical or in-depth, I use Google Translate on my phone and I don’t show him my phone; I try to say the sentences that I want to tell him in my gringo Spanish.
We pulled out of the job site at around 2:00 p.m. I was starving because I’d already been at work since 6:00 a.m., and I don’t know how many calories I burned hauling metal panels and trim. So I had Saul stop at La Chaparitta (which I now know means “short woman”) so I could buy us lunch. No one spoke English. And maybe it was because I was experiencing a significant caloric deficit, but those were the best damn tacos I’ve ever had.
I learned that Saul is from Chignahuapan, which is a town in the state of Puebla in southeast Mexico. There are mountains and natural hot springs in Chignahuapan. My friend is the oldest of six children. Two sisters, then a brother, then two other sisters. He has three daughters, ages 5, 13, and 21.
Many years ago my friend Michele turned me on to the concept of “making a fair pitcher of lemonade.” I’ve always thought of that of upholding integrity in hard work. That’s what I do now. Today I did more work, had more fun, learned more, laughed more, delivered value, and made more money than I can remember doing in a really long time.
So, so glad you’re enjoying this job!! I can tell you are by the way you write about it. There is something to be said for physical work. Sounds like you have a nice blend of desk work and physical work.