Opaque Lucidity: The Shop

July 24, 2004

The Shop

I attended a cookout this evening hosted by one of my former co-workers. My former employer was a diesel shop. I worked there for four years, mainly working on turbochargers and injectors. I'm not much of a natural mechanic, but I learn quickly and I enjoyed working with my hands.

What I miss the most, I suppose, is the comraderie that one feels from working in an all-male shop. It reminded me a lot of the Navy; the rough corners are evident in men when there are few women around. Conversation is a lot more open, in both good and bad ways.

There's something about working in an office that is de-masculating. One's conversation must be guarded and very PC, lest some middle-aged divorcee who smells money become offended. Any dirty joke or "man story" is told in whispers and then only rarely. There are times I feel as if I must almost hide the fact that I am a man in order to get by. The most successful men in that atmosphere, it seems, are the ones who manage to become sort of wussified yes-men, incapable of independent thought or action.

A prime example of this occured about three weeks ago. One of the women I work with accidently set off our building alarm when she left work later than usual. She caught the attention of one of the company's vice-presidents and asked him what she should do. He went into a panic, apparently scared that someone would blame him for the alarm. He called one of the owners (who was in the middle of a dinner party at his home with his district's Congresswoman) just to mention the name of the person who set off the alarm. The simple and correct thing to do would've been to just wait for the police and explain the situation so the alarm could be reset. But this cat was so interested in absolving himself from blame that he lost all sense of proportion. As some friends in Texas used to say, he's one of the guys you have to shoot first in the event of a real emergency. Yet, he's a vice-president making very, very good money.

I miss coming home with dirty hands.

Posted by Matthew at July 24, 2004 11:35 PM

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