It occurs to me that, if I'm going to tell you about things that happen at work, you could use a few more details about us. Here's a little color.
To the extent that you haven't figured it out already, either from context or from talking to me in real life, for about three weeks now I've been serving as the interim maintenance liaison for a company that manages properties, mostly rental properties. That is, we're usually not the landlords per se; usually we're the people that local landlords hire on a long-term basis to help them run their apartment, rental house, mobile home park, or what have you. I think that entails a variety of things - certainly we oversee stuff like lease signings, evictions, and I think some record-keeping as well. And, of course, building maintenance goes through us, which is where the maintenance staff and I come in. Their tenants call us, rather than the owner, when their toilets are broken or their ceiling leaks or they lose heat or power.
I'm about to employ a bunch of pseudonyms here, so don't take any of these names as corresponding to their given ones.
We have four main maintenance guys on the payroll - or at least four with whom I work, since apparently there are two others whose jobs are more specialized (construction, for instance) and whom I won't see at this time of year. Two of them, Ben and Jake, do most of the repairs. Ben is the cornerstone of our maintenance department: smart, skilled, hardworking. Jake, though older than Ben, is something of an apprentice - there're only some things he can do yet. I don't know much about either of them outside of their work selves, but Ben is married to Tamara, who works for our (well, "our" is kind of a strong word, as you'll see) professional-cleaning staff; more on them in a minute.
Cal, the third main maintenance guy, doesn't really make repairs (well, come to think of it, he does change locks); instead, he does the janitorial-type jobs - if you need something dirty done, from hauling out garbage to seeing whether there's a dead body in one of the apartments (for real, he had to go check for one this week - thankfully, the tenant whom we'd been afraid might be dead was still alive), he's your guy. He also does the messenger and errand-oriented jobs - lets appliance-delivery staff into vacant apartments, takes written notices out to tenants, shows up to represent us for evictions, and all kinds of things like that. It's easier to know about him as a person because he's in the office more, and is more talkative. I know that he's in his early forties and that he likes, probably among other genres, music from the 80s.
Vince is our main painter, busy at this time of year on what're called "make-ready" jobs, where we prep a property for anyone who's moving in. He's happy-go-lucky, low-pitched and a little drawly of speech - a little like how old, friendly dogs talk in animated movies. He seems to work hard and enjoy himself fairly well, and he likes to joke around and doesn't seem to get angry easily.
Besides them, we have two contractors we work with a lot. Bart gets called a couple of times, basically every day, to go do something that our guys don't do (like remodeling jobs) or don't have time to. He stands out from the main staff both because he's a little younger (the others are in their forties and up) and because he's clean-shaven (even to his shaved head), whereas all the main maintenance guys sport facial hair. Besides him, there's Ash; I've met him briefly, but so far all I know is that he, too, is younger, and that he's got a voice that to me says "surfer dude."
I also ought to mention Clem - I've never met him in person, but he's in charge of maintenance for certain properties that we manage under a sort of subdivision of the main company. I'm told he's a Quaker and that he's in his seventies. Over the phone, he's got a high-pitched old-guy voice (a lot like Mike Hamar's from
The Red Green Show) and sounds lively and opinionated.
There's also a whole cleaning staff, mainly female (although there's a guy who cleans carpets and suchlike) - they're not maids, though. They actually work for a small separate company run by my immediate boss, and they're employed mainly for make-readies, so as far as I can tell, they clean vacant properties rather than ones with active residents. The aforementioned Tamara, married to Ben, appears to be the head employee; I've met a couple of her assistants as well.
You may have noticed that I've given all the maintenance guys one-syllable names. This is on purpose. That's exactly how it is in real life: even the guys whose full names are multisyllabic go by single-syllable nicknames. Thus far I have met no exceptions, unless you want to count my bosses, to the extent that they're considered maintenance (though really they're many other things).
My upper boss, the company's owner, speaks a little disparagingly (though not when they're around) of the maintenance guys' intelligence sometimes. I don't agree with him, as I'm about to detail, but it probably stems partly from the job logs they turn in, where they detail their work every day. Cal's handwriting is almost impossible to decipher sometimes, Jake can't spell worth a lick, and even Ben tends to give his whole report in one long fused sentence speckled with apostrophe-essed plurals. And Vince, for all his graceful handwriting, does tend to use quotation marks to mark emphasis:
Paint Complete
"3 Bedrooms"
** Note: Stairs at Lot 16 are broken - "Safety Hazard" ** It's an imperfect office altogether, and we're imperfect, quirky people. Maintenance is no exception: Cal leaves gaps in his timecards where he's been reading a newspaper on the job. Bart, rather than ever starting a job and just working through to its finish, takes on about twenty of them per week and then stretches them all out forever, telling you one day he'll get there tomorrow, and then three days later, with no trace of irony, that he's about to start. Jake probably does willfully misunderstand things once in a while, knowing that it'll lessen his workload a bit if he doesn't ask too many questions. Ben often doesn't make doing inventory any easier for me than he has to: despite my knowing basically nothing about tools and parts, he doesn't go out of his way to specify, or to estimate prices, though sometimes there're four parts in the system under the name he's given, and all of them costing different amounts of money. And to them, I'm probably a bit of a headache myself - not to be trusted yet to ask the right questions of tenants over the phone; unfamiliar with property locations (which makes a difference when I have to decide where to send them next); unable sometimes to hierarchize the relative importance of this job versus that; having always to double-check things with the owner, which takes up everybody's time; maybe even a little too polite to them over the phone.
But I like them, and I admire what they do. I'm quick at typing - quick with my fingers - but poor with my hands, usually not very good at things that are manual, mechanical, dirty, or rough. Even in the kitchen, for all I
know about food and flavors, I'm slow with a knife and imprecise with a spatula - slicing vegetables unevenly, curling eggs over themselves, making a mess of just-baked cookies. I can't even picture applying a wax seal to a toilet, let alone trimming a counter or digging up a line, or painting a whole apartment well enough to please a stranger. And I wouldn't want to be sent to go help evict a tenant or check for a corpse - or, like the cleaning staff, scrub out some putrid old refrigerator.
It all makes me the more impressed with my dad, who in addition to having a PhD in administration, in addition to his day job as a college vice-president, can still do just about any home-maintenance task short of plumbing. I think he learned a lot of it while growing up - he painted houses or something in high school as a summer job, and I think his dad (who died before I was born) did hands-on work of some kind. When I was a kid, when my dad didn't want to do his graduate work, he worked on our house - finished the basement, built a deck. He hasn't taught any of it to his children, though; Sean and I, drawn to computers, to video games, to sports (him) and books (me), weren't really interested - and may not have been let to even if we were, or at least that's how it felt at the time, though it may not have been entirely true.
I did occasionally pull my dad's home-maintenance book off the shelf and flip through it, especially the part in the back, where they talked about what would go into different levels of toolkits (basic, intermediate, advanced). For me, of course, it was mainly for the pleasure of the illustrations and of new vocabulary words. I surprised my dad once when I was in junior high or so: he, doing some household task, absently asked me to bring him a screwdriver, and I asked back whether it should be flathead or Phillips-head. Now sometimes I think about that book when I'm at work. Looking around my very interesting new world, filled with very interesting people, I wish I'd taken more of it in back then.