What is a Construction Worker?

An Observance of "Tough" America

It has been my pleasure, sincerely, to have had the honor of working in a field that might be loosely termed as "construction." As a child, a "construction" worker always brought forth images of concrete being poured onto a busted up road, in the opposite lane as the one your parents were driving in. My first bout with construction, or construction work (it is now time to lose the quotation marks), came during the summer before my senior year of high school, and lasted only three months. I was employed by a company called S&B Custom Homes, established in Wyndmere, North Dakota, and it was there I learned, or realized, that construction workers are really, technically, anyone who constructed something. At S&B, we built houses (I mostly doing the grunt work), and the term construction worker applied to the men who worked around me. So it was that summer, to the best of my knowledge, that the epiphany (however small and irrelevant it was) happened.

Recently, not two days ago, the opportunity befell upon me to work for an edgy, but happy, owner of a hotel line, who needed extra help (grunt work) with some of the odd jobs around a new building he was having built. The owner is a bald, but young-looking, man, with eyes that might be brown, but certainly hold a shade of green. I've never seen him unenthusiastic. Like this man's apparent zeal toward life, the hotel building is very large and expansive. It is in its final stages and is scheduled to open in a month. Around work, the owner calls people "buddy" and "pal" and says things like, "Great job, there, buddy, yeah, keep up what you're doing, because you're doing it perfectly."

It would be one thing to make assumptions about construction workers, and who they are, just by glancing at them out of the car windows, or from across the street. So, consequentially, keeping in mind how shallow assumptions can be, I'm going to justify any assuming I happen to do by spanning time and focusing, at least in my head, on life in the construction zone, and call it "experience."