Today I got a call from my two friends that I worked out onsite with for over a year, S and M (insert snicker here). Both of them have left the company to do other things, but we all keep in touch and I talk to at least one or the other every week and see them now and then. We were like the Three Musketeers out there on the jobsite – united by our common hatred of the jackass superintendent Napoleon, we banded together and became like a little dysfunctional family of our own. S has gone to work for a concrete subcontractor and is doing really well for himself, plus his wife is pregnant with their first baby and they’re buying a new home. M went to work for another general contractor, which didn’t work out, and now is doing his own carpentry/handyman/whatever the hell else someone will pay some ungodly hourly rate to do thing.
While we were eating our lunch, M started telling us this story about a client that he finished up working for about a week ago. He’d been working at this lady’s house for about two weeks doing some drywall repairs, replacing a door, and just a general “honey do” list, and when he finished the work she called him and let him know that his check was ready and that she would leave it on her kitchen island to pick up. Now, anyone who knows M will tell you that he is a very trustworthy guy…like you could totally leave your house unlocked and not only would he let himself in, he would make sure he locked the door behind himself after he finished his day’s work and you couldn’t even tell he was there to start with.
So M went over to the lady’s house to pick up the check only to discover that all of the doors were locked. He called her on her cell phone, and she told him that she was headed out of town for a few days but if he really wanted the check there was a cat door located in the garage door that he could try and shimmy through to get to the spare key in the garage. M apprised the situation for a few minutes and decided that he would give the cat door a try.
To make a long story short, M took his screwdriver out, dismantled the cat door, and was almost entirely through it when he was caught by the nosy 80-year old next door neighbor who had decided that M was a burglar and was going to call the police on him. Keep in mind, M had been working there daily for weeks, parking the same truck in the driveway complete with ladder rack, ladders, and lumber hanging off of it, and it wasn’t like he was skulking through the bushes. It eventually got straightened out with a phone call to the lady who owned the house, but M was pretty relieved to get that check and get the hell out of there.
S and I couldn’t stop laughing. “M, that has got to be the most pathetic story I have ever heard. That must have been one hell of a check for you to go shimmying through a cat door to get it.”
“Well,” he shrugged, “I knew she was headed out of town to Vegas so I figured I better get that check before she blew it at Caesar’s or something.”
Good point. Although the visual of this over 6-foot tall former Marine squeezing through a cat door is almost pants-wetting worthy. Either he is hella flexible, or that was one big-ass cat.
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If the money's good enough... Never really know about people, do you?
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