One of the guys on the crew, Jake (do I have to say that it’s not his real name), is a study unto himself. He’s been with us off and on since early in the project, although we haven’t had him working for awhile now. Now his big saving grace is that he shows up, on time, all the time, when asked. This has been a big selling point with me, as it appears to be a rare trait amongst the folks I’ve hired. By way of an example I had a fellow show up at the site looking for work. As he had some experience and we just happened to let a fellow go for not showing up, I told him to start that afternoon.
I should have been more specific. Around 2:30 he showed up, without any of his tools of course. So we got him a belt, hammer, tape measure etc and put him to work. He had potential so he was hired. He showed up the next day a little late, but put in a days work. The third day he never showed, and he never came back. About a week or two later he called to say he wouldn’t be coming in, even though I’d kind of figured that out by then.
But Jake, he shows up. Usually right around the start of the day he walks in, travel coffee mug in hand (I’m not sure where he found the Starbucks). It usually takes him awhile to warm up and he surveys the site for awhile. Now not only is Jake reliable, he is Meticulous (its capitalized for a reason). Once you give him a task, he does a good job and is thorough. Sic him on cleaning up snow and he will be down on his hands and knees with a whisk broom. Now unfortunately this is a double edged sword. A simple task will turn into an all day job. We once had him clean snow out the house, he was bound and determined to get every flake of snow, which wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing, but it started snowing shortly after he started. He would sweep out snow, turn around and there would be more, so he’d sweep out that snow, and then the snow that had fallen since then, and so on.
Efficiency wasn’t his strong suit. By way of example he was tasked with cutting stress blocks for the rafter joists. These are strips of 1/2" plywood, four or five inches wide that fill in the ends of the I beam that is the joist. Two strips go on each side the "I" on both ends of the joist, for a total of eight of these per joist. With over a hundred roof joists there are a bunch of these to cut. So plywood gets ripped to the four or five inch width on a table saw, and then taken to the mitre saw and cut to length. A jig is used on the mitre saw, so you just put the plywood strip against the jig cut and it is the right length, no need to individually measure each piece. You can knock off a surprising amount of pieces in relatively quick order this way, cutting moving the piece to the side, positioning the strip, cutting again. Well, Jake would cut a piece, pick it up, saunter over to a ledge about 10 feet away from the saw, stack the piece neatly on the slowly growing pile, saunter back and cut another piece. I don’t even want to get into the uniformly sized pieces of poly for vapour barrier for the joist spaces that were all individual measured, sometimes two or three times.
Gary was up working on scaffolding on one occasion and needed a length of 1×6. Now a word of explanation is probably needed for those with no experience with lumber, a 1×6 measures 3/4" x 5 1/2 inches. Likewise a 2×4 is 1 1/2 X 3 1/2 inches, etc. Gary saw Jake down below and told him to get him a 1X6 so many inches long. Twenty minutes later he still hadn’t come back so Gary went to get the piece himself. As he was going for the piece he found Jake, who explained he’d been all over the site but was unable to find any boards 6 inches wide, only 5 1/2.
But, he shows up on time when asked.