Carpeting

I needed to go into work for a few hours today and found myself in the middle of the re-carpeting of the yellow level staffroom, an exercise for which I'd packed most of the stuff on my desk away to allow the workmen an uncluttered run at things. I think the workmen had only started today but by the time I walked in, around 10.00 am, they'd already pretty much finished around my desk, although they still had lots to do generally. I felt quite bad getting in the way, but they took the presence of teachers in their stride. By the time I left, in the middle of the afternoon, the job was well on its way to completion.

The unhurried but purposeful way the guys took the whole thing on, and how they worked around all obstacles, human and otherwise, was a reminder of work with a different set of rhythms than those to which I have become accustomed. I found myself thinking back to work in the factory, before I went to university, and the industrial cleaning jobs I did in my teens at weekends & holidays. The industrial cleaning particularly required that talent of getting things done without getting in the way of the 'real' workers you were serving, and always being ready to accept the mess that work required you to live with, yet uncreate. Not that I developed anything like the deft skills of the team laying the carpet today. That was also a reminder of how much I hated having to lay carpet in the house in those days when we couldn't afford to get proper workmen in.

In the way I understood work when I was eighteen, and the way Dad would have understood it, I haven't worked hard for years.