I have obtained A Job. Said Job is both
a)really cool
and
b) completely boring.
I'm working for a painting company on the restoration of a Masonic Lodge turned hotel convention center. It's cool in that I get to work in a circa 1908 Masonic Lodge everyday and my co-workers are really nice and fun. It's really boring painting though. The building is huge and very, um, grand. Think rooms with 25' high plaster relief ceilings. Marble columns. Gold leaf. Marble floors. Marble everything. Giant gold "G"s on the walls of many rooms, radiating golden rays.* Climbing up to the 5th floor is a real chore, because it's way more than 5 stories up. It's more like ten, due to the incredibly high ceilings in each and every room.
Of course, I love it. Even though I spend all day on a 20' scaffold in the Corinthian Room, painting the 25' ceiling (How do you stand up straight? With difficulty.) I am in love with this building.
But it is an old building. Bits of it are somewhat delicate. Today I was on my scaffold, happily priming away. I put out my hand and rested it on the plaster capital of one of the columns. A chunk the size of my head fell off and plummeted to the floor. It smashed into 5 big chunks and approximately ten thousand tiny bits. Oh, shit. I have just broken a 97 year-old building. This is the sort of thing you get sent straight to Hell for in my philosophy. Jim the Plaster Guy started laughing riotously. Greg, my scaffold buddy, immediately felt better about the fact that he had earlier spilled a quart of oil primer on the marble floor. Suddenly I was Asshole of the Day. Hell.
Boss Mariah was very nice about the whole thing. It seemed to be no more than she was expecting from the capitals, which are falling apart anyway. Still. I will be mocked about this for days. By a guy named Toad, no less.