"How's this job coming?"
His left eye is clamped tight shut, channeling vision through his right into the lens of a hydrometer. "This guy's coolant's too weak."
"All right." I suppress the urge to tell him that his 'Buick's not all the way in the garage' for the second time today. He seems to appreciate the added air conditioning in the nether regions. "But how long will you be? You've got plugs to do on a Ford pickup and only 2 hours left in your day."
He peels his eyeball from the lens and glares at me like I've just loosed a stinker in church.
"Aw for cripes sake! Give that job to Gil. Damn Ford's are gonna drive me to drinkin'...heavier."
"Job's in your slot. Gil's fighting with an alignment. Customer wants his truck by 5. I'll call this customer to see if she wants her coolant spiked."
Kachang...kachang! The raw impact of solid steel on steel cracks in my head like a detonation in a bell factory. I clamp my hands tight over my ears, rolling my eye balls back into their sockets, while Quasimodo takes another swing at a rebellious rotor.
"Really?" I exclaim into the racket, my voice dissolving into a million splinters and dropping at my feet. "You could warn a person." Kachang...kachang!
In bay 3 Gil has commissioned the air gun at mach 1, breaking the sound barrier and any crystal that may have the misfortune of being within 100 feet. Together they sound like a redneck symphony.
I seek refuge in the office. If they're trying to get the boss from breathing down their necks they know how to do it.
The office door swings open and Walt shuffles in. By this time of day he's covered in greasy splatters and tire tread marks. I often muse at how he can look like he's been run over by a truck...every day.
He grabs the waiting keys and slaps a work order into his clip board. "Son of a freaking bocce ball, gold damn plugs..." The colorful expletives follow him out the front door and into the parking lot, leaving a thick black ooze behind him, lingering like the stench from a sewer back up in spring.
"Walt is feeling rather loquacious today. What's got his knickers in a knot?" Cody is talking into the computer screen, his generation Y fingers moving on the keyboard faster than humanly possible.
I smile. Having grown up in this shop and spending a few years himself in the automotive trenches, Cody had learned to knit together a few experimental rows of superlatives himself. Still, as a service writer, a few slip in here and there when the necessity for a 'bring it home' adjective arises. Knit, knit, knit, purl.
We never forbade the use of bad language at home. If we had, their father would have had a bar of Palmolive in his mouth on more than one occasion. What seemed more effective, at the time, was to inform our kids that people who intersperse truck stop language profusely throughout their sentences come across to their listeners as Kindergarten drop-outs. Knit, purl, knit, purl - or more appropriately, knit, hurl, knit, hurl.
If you want to shut the potty mouth up (and everyone does), use intelligent words. It'll throw them from the vulgarity train onto their cocky keesters real quick.
"Plugs on a Ford F150." I respond.
"Aah. Damn, that's too bad."
"Yup. For all of us."
Working in a world of kinesthetic males performing gruelling, sweat-inducing tasks means frequent releases of oral diarrhea and lingual gaseous explosions. After a while it begins to take on its own vernacular.
Occasionally I slip and, for a fleeting moment, sound like one of the boys. It's like living with an Aussie. Eventually you're going to start to talk like one, mate. And that's okay. Outside of the profanity and belches that break the needle on the richter scale, they're just good old boys.
I'm a little out of my element in their world. But when they slap me on the back or email naughty pictures to my inbox, I can't help but grin. Sometimes its alright being 'one o' the boys.'
No comments:
Post a Comment