By Jim Hagarty
2012
When I was 16 I got a job on construction in the city of Kitchener, Ontario, helping put up a bridge for the soon-to-be-built Conestoga Expressway.
One day, shortly after I started, one of the carpenters asked me to bring him a board stretcher. Now in all my years of carpentry around the farm I grew up on, I’d never heard of a board stretcher and something told me there was no such thing. But what did I know? This guy was officially a carpenter, had a carpenter’s belt on and everything. So I asked him where it was. He said it was probably in the construction trailer and that I should go look there.
So I did.
While I was searching, increasingly frantic because I didn’t want to take too long, the superintendent on the job came out of his office in the trailer and asked me what I was looking for. I told him I needed the board stretcher.
“Hmmm,” he said, standing there in his white hard hat (as opposed to the rest of us in our yellow ones). “I don’t know where that has gotten to. I’ll help you look.”
And he did.
But alas, I had to report back to a laughing carpenter – and 20 other guffawing workers – that I couldn’t find it.
I never fell for any other tricks after that but other newbies were sent for the sky hook with similar results to mine. And I once worked in a factory where they sent new guys for a bucket of steam.
How cruel!
