And So It Begins....

As noted in the overview, I'm heading back to carpentry work. I'm looking forward to doing some real work with my hands again, but I'm definitely nervous as to how my body will take it.

For the last seven years, I've spent my time in a nice soft office environment where the greatest threat of injury was from a paper cut. Incidentally, I've learned that paper cuts are painful little bastards.

I'm not sure what is going to be the worst for my pansy suit-and-tie body, but I know my muscles need to adjust, my hands need to re-grow calluses, and my feet are going to get thrashed with a new pair of work boots. In time, that should go away, and I will hopefully be in much better shape in a few months.

Goodbye Office

Fortunately, on the construction site, I’m pretty sure that I will no longer have to say things like, Core Competency, Paradigm, Leverage, Six Sigma, Best Practices, Organic Growth, Management Culture, Strategic Vision, or any of the other garbage business school jargon that I've been using for the past few years to make myself sound smarter.

I definitely will not miss the fat-office-women! Every office has them, the bloated cows who roam the halls in a desperate search to see if their fat sisters have added new candy to the glass bowls on their sad, child-photo-covered desks. These women are the scourge of the office environment, constantly pressuring you to eat candy & doughnuts, and always wearing something that even a woman of half their size would struggle to pull off.

As an office worker, in addition to the horror of seeing their bloated frames waddling from place to place, you must also keenly restrict what you say around them. Fat-office-women TALK! If someone is going to feel sexually harassed, or religiously offended, or whatever, it will definitely be a fat-office-woman. Be especially cautious with the Midwest Breed of the fat-office-woman, as their lives are acutely pathetic so the need to derive superiority by being morally outraged is ever present. Good riddance.

Most of all, I will not miss the constant sense of never accomplishing anything. No matter how hard you work in an office job, you’re still going to be doing something fairly similar the next day. When I really busted my ass, at the end of the day, I could look at a report, or spreadsheet, or some other intangible expression of my effort. On the construction site, I can go home at the end of the day and see a set of walls that I put up, and that’s just a lot more rewarding than a computer file.

Hello Man-Work

In my constant drive to assimilate and eventually conquer the business world, I never lost my childhood redneck fascination with getting dirty. Wearing business suits and wing tips is nice, and the fact that showering after work is optional was always a plus, but nothing beats dirt and sawdust. I get to go back to the days when getting something sticky on your hands means rubbing them in the dirt and moving on with your day, instead of franticly scrubbing in front of the bathroom sink.

One word; Cussing. I can pretty much say whatever foul-mouthed garbage I want to on a construction site. Hell, around the right crew, I might even be able to bust racist jokes from time to time. One thing is for sure though; I can drop the F-bomb without caution.

Over the past seven years, the closest I got to working with a power tool was the electric hole-puncher. As a side note, if you put too much paper in those things, it wrecks them…Trust me. Sure, there were electric pencil sharpeners, and electric staplers, and those huge paper cutters our teachers would never let us touch in grade-school, but all of that pales in comparison to a nail gun. Compressed air launching a steel spike into solid wood, or bone, or whatever else gets in its way….COOOOLLL. Before you get to nail something though, there is a plethora of saws and routers and drills and other various wood shredding devices to entertain myself with. Power Tools Rock!

Preparation Time

I don’t actually start doing man-work again until Monday. In the meantime, I have to get my tools ready, and just get myself psyched up to start.

I’m looking forward to doing some real work for a change, and I think that the company I’ve joined will provide a great opportunity to learn a lot about the business. Hell, if nothing else, I get to be outside enjoying the fantastic weather of a Lake Tahoe Summer.

Once I start working, I plan to write at least a short daily update with my weight and condition. I really think that going from sitting on my fat can all day to working and burning calories will give me better results than any of your new wave diets.

My hypothesis is that our society is not fat because of fast foot and sugars, but because we all loaf most of the day. When our grandparents were working, a large percentage of them were in physical jobs, while most of our generation seems to be wasting away in some sedentary office job.
I will not change my food intake; I will not pick up an extra exercise regiment. The only thing I will change is my working environment. I aim to prove that office jobs can be blamed for the fattening of America, or at least the fattening of me.