Hiding amidst the dust and mist 2/27/05

I’ve been at my job for three and a half weeks. This is a new position in a growing young company and I’d been lobbying an old friend for it, almost jokingly, for months. I came close to two other jobs that were of great interest, during my search, but didn’t get either. As it turns out, this is much better, because it’s here and it’s flexible and I can continue my involvement with youth baseball, both as a Little League district staffer and as a “General Manager” of my son’s (loosely school affiliated) off-season 18U team. I am very, very pleased. I’ll admit that it hasn’t been easy, because my “old” job, managing the (frustrating, brain-breaking, seemingly eternally contentious) work associated with our portfolio of patents, has gone through a very busy spurt during these first weeks of my new job, so I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and still falling behind, coming off a nasty cold. I’m bushed… but happy. I’ve been hired by a small company in the commercial demolition business. Nothing could be farther from my experience or my background. We’re managing a number of smaller jobs at the moment, but, so far, I’ve had nothing to do with those. At the moment, I’ve been placed inside another company, with which we have partnered on one huge job that we’re trying to finish on time, to try to make some sense of their communications, information management and documentation systems that have been sorely taxed by the huge job. I’m in a trailer on that job site, amidst the huge machines, in the cloud surrounding the noisy work of metal separating and concrete crushing, at least through March. It’s exciting every day, and I really like the people at both companies. There are more than enough characters to go around, most notably the site boss, who runs the day-to-day show but whose systems I have been put in place to change. It’s a miracle he doesn’t hate me, but he doesn’t seem to. He’s a fiery Louisiana native and he is the primary energy on the site (think diva), but he works harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. His whole family is active in the business, with his wife running the administrative show back at the house (the “main office”) with two assistants, and her two nearly-grown sons working some everyday, either back at the house or with me in the trailer. My real bosses, the ones who pay me, are in a much nicer trailer next door. I’ve been told we’ll be moving into newly acquired, actual offices, in April. I don’t know whether or not the other guys (the ones I’m functionally working for) will be moving their operation, or part of it, in with us. It’s all rather confusing and challenging, but fun and fascinating, indeed. A couple of times they’ve cooked bar-b-qued chicken on the grill at the job site for lunch, and week before last, the brother of the site boss, who has come up here to help us meet this deadline, went home to Louisiana for a few days to visit his family and came back hauling a trailer to which was strapped an upright freezer full of crawfish, so we had a crawfish boil on the site, with corn and potatoes and onions and boudin sausage. It was fabulous and amazing and wonderful too. I’m in an apartment after a lifetime of successfully avoiding ever living in an apartment complex, but this one has a secret, tucked away in the woods, cozily in this city. We’re at the very back of the small older development, which is, for the most part, surrounded by trees in a very nice neighborhood, and we overlook a small lake, maybe thirty-five yards down the hill through the foliage, but we sit just above the spillway where the creek flows into the lake, and when it rains, we have a full-blown noise, mist and negative ion producing waterfall, just outside. We can’t see the spillway, but we can hear it and feel it. It’s a bit like I’m hiding (and healing) and it feels wonderful.