Grumpy Old Man

Anger management once again pays off. I was about a gnats eyelash away from pushing some grumpy old fat guy off a ladder this weekend. But, I walked away, counted to ten and then pushed him off the ladder. No, just kidding. I actually regained my composure and just laughed at the guy. I think that may have made him more angry. So, you are probably wondering what lead up to all of this. Well, I was working at an extremely crowded construction sight, where we all had the same common goal, which was to finish. What I was working on was finish carpentry. As usual, I was working on base trim. I had a piece of 12 foot base sitting on the floor and I was going over to grab it when the grumpy old man put his ladder over the top of it so it was impossible to pick up without moving said ladder. I said to him, "Oh, actually I need to grab that piece of piece of trim you just put your ladder over."

The grumpy old man looks at the piece of base, and while stepping on to the ladder he says, "I will be done in just a minute."

Now, let it be known that the guy was done with his task in under 3 minutes. But how long would it have taken for the guy to move the ladder and allow me to get my piece of base out from under his ladder? My guess would be around 15 seconds or so. I am no math wizard, but I am pretty sure it would have made more sense for him to move his ladder, but of course I am quite biased in my stance. Didn't he, by his actions, put the project behind another 2 minutes or so? Of course all of this was frustrating, but this wasn't when I wanted to push him off the ladder. So, let's move on to the next stage of my anger pot wanting to boil over.

A few moments later after he was done screwing around on the ladder, he was coming down, and he had put a piece of ceiling tile against the wall where I was going to install the base molding. I picked up the ceiling tile to move it, and as soon as this old geezers foot hit the floor, he ripped the ceiling tile out of my hand while saying the ever so eloquent and well thought out words, "Gimme that!".

I just shook my head and as he moved his ladder, I picked up my piece of base. For the next several minutes I went about my business and did what I was set there to do, put in base. When I was finishing up my last piece, a person from the safety department came in the room and asked the grumpy old cuss if he was using the scaffolding that was blocking the exterior door that came into the room. The old poop said he would be using it again in a minute. The safety guy said, that it was blocking the entrance, so if he wasn't using it, could he please keep it out of the way. It was at this moment that my anger pot almost runneth over. The old coot said, "If they want it, they can go around and come in another door."

I looked up at him and saw that he was smiling, but after seeing his behavior over the past 15 minutes, I knew he wasn't kidding. It was at that moment that I wanted to just accidentally "bump" into his ladder. But instead, I looked at him and said, "You know, you aren't a very nice person." I then gathered up my tools and walked out of the room. Having reached my anger management capacity, I told my boss man that I had to go home and go to bed. I knew that if I had another encounter with that guy, it wasn't going to be pretty, and I would come out on the short end of the stick.

I like to look at this experience as a triumph of sorts. First of all, no grumpy old men were injured in the making of that building. And I kept my cool under some fairly adverse conditions. I may have turned the corner in my quest to rid my self of the curse of the medulla oblongata.