I was a week and a half into my summer job. As a soon-to-be sophomore university student, I didn’t have enough knowledge of any kind to pull an academic internship, so I fell back upon my history of working as a laborer in various trades. Luckily, I had a high school buddy whose brother had just moved back into my home town to start a family construction business and was looking for labor. They were much more interested in my willingness to work hard than my complete lack of experience in construction, and they hired on the spot - on condition that I got some good work boots and I cut my shoulder length blonde hair.
Construction has a lingo of its own. Every piece of wood has a name: if it’s in a wall, it’s either a plate, stud, or a post. If it’s in a ceiling it’s a joist, a rafter, or part of a truss; or it’s a collar tie, or purlin. Or maybe it’s just a block. Construction, framing in particular, also has a culture of its own. You are expected to hustle always and everywhere. My boss used to wax poetic about how he loved the sound of nails jingling in our tool bags as we ran from task to task. Recklessness and unsafe behavior were never promoted or condoned, but your safe behavior had better not come at the cost of your productivity.
My first days on the jobsite, I spent most of my time running around in circles trying to provide the lead carpenters with whatever lumber product they were calling for. There wasn’t time to pull out a tape measure (which I was still learning how to read properly), I would just identify lumber as best as I could, based on the name of the product the lead hollered for, and run it back to him, hoping that I had the right piece of wood. Then if I had to, I’d run back to the lumber pile and to it all over again. The one thing I knew I could do was hustle. I could trot from the lumber pile and back to the lead carrying lumber all day and not even blink. This was a good thing - because that’s about all I did for the first two weeks.
By Friday of my second week of work, I felt like I was finally starting to gain a minimal level of competence on the jobsite. While still pretty slow at it, I’d figured out how to read the tape measure, I was learning to identify lumber by site, and I was actually catching up with the leads instead of working my way down an endless list of demands. It was after lunch and I was fighting the post lunch letdown that my massive burrito was wanting to give me, when Jason, the main lead called down from the second story scaffold for me to get him the boardstretcher.
My post-lunch fog was immediately vanquished by the momentary panic that accompanied every demand I’d received over the last two weeks for some tool or material I’d never heard of. But whereas with most of their requests I could figure out what they were looking for by the words they used or the task at hand; on this one I had no clue what he was asking for.
“The what!?” I called back.
“The boardstretcher! I cut this damn piece wrong and I need the *&$# boardstretcher!” Profanities laced much of what the guys said to me and when combined with the use of volume, they were very helpful for conveying the level of urgency that was required to accompany the task requested therein. Based on the tonal range, quality of the profanities used, and the volume at which they were expelled, I could tell that there was a problem and I needed to find the boardstretcher post-haste. Still, I had no *&$# clue what a boardstretcher was (I kept my profanities hidden in my inner monologue), but I was too proud to ask directly, so I hollered back,
“Where is ii?”
“I don’t know man! Go ask Brian!”
I ran off to the other side of jobsite and found Brian similarly perched on scaffolding working on siding up a dormer fighting down my frustration. I had just felt like I was getting the hang of this job!
“Jason needs the boardstretcher! Do you have it?” I hollered up to him.
“Jason needs the board stretcher?” He paused and grinned, “That dumbass must’ve made another bad cut. I don’t have it. Last I saw, Phil had it down at the Grayson house; run down there and get it from him”
We’d had the good luck to have two jobs that within a same block that we were working on at the same time. The Grayson house was a large remodel that was almost complete. Phil was the finish carpenter and was trimming out a beautiful fireplace mantel while the framing team was four houses down framing and siding a large barn, and training up their new laborer, me.
I set off down the street at a trot, nails in my bags jingling just the way the boss liked, worrying a bit about this boardstretcher. If it was the size of a speedsquare or cat’s paw (two of the new tools I’d just learned about), no problem. If it was the size of a table saw, or band saw (two more brand new tools I’d just learned about), I’d have some work cut out for me. I was doing some simple math; If the boardstretcher lived up to its obvious name, and Jason was working on a 9’ piece of siding, it was not likely to be a small tool and I was in for a haul getting it back from the Grayson house to the barn.
But my concerns on the size of the boardstretcher were allayed by Phil:
“The boardstretcher? Phil was a finish carpenter, not a framer; he was quieter, always had a mechanical pencil behind his ear, and kept his tools almost obsessively clean and organized. He frowned a minute. “I think the boss has it actually. Why don’t you call him?”
This was 2002 and my flip phone was brand new and in my car, parked back down the street in front of the barn, where it wouldn’t get dropped, smashed, or buried in sawdust. I trotted back up the street, nails jingling merrily all the way to my little pickup truck. I pulled my phone from the center console and dialed the boss’s number as I walked back towards the barn. The boss was and is a man whom I have immense respect for, but he is not the sort of person one might be particularly excited about having to call and ask a potentially ignorant question. I half hoped he just wouldn’t answer, but he picked up after the fourth ring and I had a job to do, so I plied him with my query.
“So Jason needs the boardstretcher does he?”
“Yeah, and I’ve asked everybody, even Phil, but they seem to think you have it.”
“Is Jason right there?” I looked up at the scaffold where Jason was working away, apparently not stalled too badly by his need for the boardstretcher.
“Yeah, he’s right here”
“Hand your phone to him”
I scrambled up the ladder and handed the phone to Jason: “Boss wants to talk to you”
Most of the words the boss said to Jason through my phone’s earpiece were too jumbled to understand, but the volume the boss was able to convey over the tiny phone speaker was impressive and I was able to make out “wasting time”, and “stupid joke” before his tone leveled out and Jason’s responses changed from grinning mischievously to measured stability; they had switched to talking materials and scheduling and how the project was going.
After a minute more, he snapped my phone shut and handed it back to me.
“You knucklehead,” he said with a grin. “There’s no such thing as a boardstretcher! Now go get me some more siding.”