When Summer and I worked in Arizona, it wasn't all spiders and scorpions and gravel-filled water meter pits. There were bathroom breaks at the community pool and FedEx stops where we got to get in the car and drive somewhere. And that's where the magic didn't happen.
I was thinking lately about all the weird and strange and depressing things I overheard when I was working in New Orleans for Serco...
Warning: Depressing.
_____
One woman told me they had to evacuate for Katrina pretty quickly and thought they would only be gone for three days. So they decided to leave their dog behind. They left him a bunch of food and filled the tub with water. They said "goodbye" and "see you in three days." Of course they didn't make it back in three days. In fact, they didn't get back for six months. Turns out their thieving neighbor robbed them blind and in the process accidentally let the dog out of the house, at which time another neighbor took the dog in. When the homeowner finally returned to her home, she decided to just let the neighbors keep the dog because they had become so attached after rescuing him. Fortunately they're just a couple of doors down so she gets to see her old dog all the time.
_____
...Another conversation with a very nice guy in his sixties:
"Marriage these days only lasts about 10 years. In my day, it was for the long haul."
"I don't get involved with dogs. In my day, if a dog bit the neighbor's kid, their mother told them, 'that's what you get. I told you to stay away from that dog!' Today, mama calls doctor, lawyer, jury."
"My son was killed. He didn't want to take my advice."
_____
...Another old black lady, while talking to me referred to George Bush as "your president." I said, "why did you call him "my president?" and she didn't reply. She just looked at me like, "duh."
_____
...Another woman told me that of her 9 children, only four are still living. One went missing for three weeks at Rita. Then he was found dead. Another died of cirrhosis of the liver, another had an aneurysm, and one was murdered. The fifth died in Katrina.
_____
SOME QUOTES FROM THE LADY WHO WAS TOTALLY HIGH, AND FORGOT TO TELL HER HUSBAND THEY HAD COMPANY BEFORE HE WALKED OUT IN HIS BOXERS AND THEN GOT VERY EMBARRASSED:
"I'm on more pain medication than anything. But sometimes I don't take the medicine cuz I don't want to get addictive."
"I don't do drugs. It's not my thing. Crackheads. That's not how you wanna look."
When her husband came out in his boxers (because he didn't know we were there) she told him, "That's what you get." He replied, "I'm about to finish you right now."
Speaking of Fashion Shows and professional photography...I'm feeling nostalgic for the high fashion workwear that Summer and I donned while programming water meters in Oro Valley, Arizona. SL-Serco asked us to model for their fall catalogue. We knew that we couldn't leave without documenting the fabulousness so during our last week together we made an appointment for a studio shoot.
You'll forgive the poor quality, as these are merely photos of the photos.
All are property of Sears Portrait Studio.
Gloves. Kneepads. Radio equipment.
The jump shot. Classic.
"Sir, my friend Kady here is looking for the flood."
Here are some pics of the whole Oro Valley (Tucson) crew. What a bunch of great sports:
This is how we got at those hard to reach pits.
LtR: Summer, Tyler, Clayton, Kady, Nate
Our motley crew installed 1200 water meters and programmed close to 1400 radios in just six weeks.
The other day at work, we were sitting in the car finishing up some paperwork and an older gentleman came out to the end of his driveway and stared me right in the eye. I shrugged my shoulders at him but he kept staring and so finally I rolled down the window.
He said, (in a Native American-slash-Canadian-slash-Mexican accent),
"To be honest with you I wish there was a problem here all the time so I can see beautiful women like you."
"Damn. You know?"
"Both of you are pretty."
"The way you are right now? I can imagine you in a dress and some makeup."
"I've been watching you work, and I thought, man, she can look like a movie star. You know?"
"It's incredible."
Summer was on the phone and I was talking to this weirdo and writing everything he was saying really fast. She wondered what all the hubbub was about and ended her phone call. She leaned across me and asked him what he needed, and he said,
"Don't believe who hired you. Believe a stranger. Don't believe whoever hired you. It's not correct to hire beautiful women. You know what I mean? Do you understand what I'm saying?"
We had to take a picture of ourselves. Because we could look like movie stars? You know?
The Summer and Kady show is about to end. Tomorrow, we get on a plane to Minneapolis to attend the wedding of some friends, and then...Summer returns to Oro Valley and then back to Michigan and I travel way up to the Canadian border to sling some burgers and beers and hang out with these people:
In order to experience a little Arizona before we leave permanently, my blog stalker turned friend Lisa drove us up to one of the mountains just an hour from our house. We wanted to see the snow...perhaps to prepare for the upcoming Minnesota winter. I'm not kidding. These photos were taken in Arizona. One hour from our house.
Don't worry! Summer and I will be reunited in January when we both return to Minneapolis, she for a semester at school and I to cover a maternity leave at my old job.
One great way to save money on a road trip is to just sleep in your car. Especially if you somehow luck out and your company lets you drive around in an SUV and you can fold the seats down and make the hugest. best. cushion. bed. ever.
It's all bed, baby.
Which is exactly what Summer and I did when we road-tripped it up to Sedona and the Grand Canyon.
Of course you can pretty much pull over anywhere you want to and sleep, but there are places that make more sense, like State Parks and Wal-mart parking lots. I mention Wal-Mart parking lots for a couple of reasons:
Open 24 Hours
Lots of RVs and campers doing the same thing. Safety!
Bathrooms!
There is a downside of course, and that's bright lights and loud noises. Nothing a little sleeping mask and earplugs can't take care of if you prepare yourself!
We spent our first night in Sedona and slept soundly under the stars in a State Park lot, where we paid $5 for a 24-hour pass. No bright lights, no noise. Gas station with Redbox and a nice bathroom right up the street. Perfect. And this was our view when we woke up:
The second night was spent at a Flagstaff Wal-Mart. Everything went off without a hitch, (after Summer shooed the drunk old man away). We parked right next to a family sleeping in their camper and slept soundly until morning, when we freshened up in the nice clean bathrooms.
The third night was a little less perfect. We drove to Phoenix, punched a Wal-Mart into the GPS and arrived at one whose late-night clientele left us feeling a little less than cozy. Also the bathrooms were gross. We decided to pull to the very edge of the parking lot next to where they sell the Christmas trees behind the chain link fence. That ended up being a tactical error because at 7am, when the Christmas tree shop opened up, we were parked right in front of the doors, and I was awakened by the sound of a gruff salesman asking a customer, "What? Did they move in?" And then Summer and I stared at each other, mortified, trying to look invisible until they walked away and then Summer jumped into the driver's seat and drove us around the corner to Target.
We got ready there instead. After Summer left the Target bathroom, I realized I wasn't going to be able to make it one more day without washing my hair, and it was so early in the morning and nobody was in there, and I brought shampoo and conditioner and they had an air dryer for your hands... I decided to wash my hair in the tiny, tiny sink.
I couldn't help but feel like I was doing something really, really wrong. Like I was going to be busted and kicked out of Target at any moment. I was almost done when a little old lady came into the bathroom with a walker. I said to her, "just pretend this isn't happening," as I wrapped my sopping wet hair up and grabbed all my stuff out of the handicapped stall so she could use it. At first she seemed irritated...but kept talking to me as she used the restroom and I finished up with my conditioner and drying with the air hand dryer. I nervously explained that we were on a road trip and didn't have bathroom facilities. She said, "well this is the cleanest bathroom in town, I don't blame you for coming here. You know, I like to come here to the Target bathroom and then go do my shopping at Wal-Mart."
I began to suspect that she thought I was homeless because she asked me several times, "Do you need help? Is there anything I can help you with?" And as she left the bathroom she cautiously and hesitantly said, "have a safe and happy life."
"We're going to the GRAND CANYON! This is your best chance to be FIERCE ladies. I want jeans, I want little to no make up. I want wind-blown hair and $2 Target gloves. I want sweaters and scarves and try to look cold!"
"Perfect, Kady, now...lose the sunglasses."
"Yes, yes that's right...but stop squinting your eyes. Use the trees!"
"Great. Now, less tree, more EMOTION."
"Now I want to see you get low. Really, get down there."
"MMmmmhmmmm....boooo-tay.
Fierce."
"Maybe a little less butt."
"OK. Perfect, now don't forget about that tree."
"No, don't hide behind it!"
"We're losing daylight here, folks. We might have to wrap early."
"One more, just in case."
"I'm sorry, Kady. You are no longer in the running to be America's Next Top Model."
Inch-and-a-half long roots, you are so out of here. (See you again in ten weeks). Blurg. I can't complain though because I'm finally living in a country where when I need my hair done, I just have to push a button on my new phone, say to an imaginary woman named Siri (who pronounces my name 'Caddy' so I had to change the spelling of my name in my phone to 'Katie') "I need a hair cut" and then she gives me all the nearest hair salons and I just pick the closest one to wherever I am and go there.
Of course I forgot to ask how much beforehand and got duped out of $130 plus tip, but oh, the convenience.
In order to release pent up roommate anger, sometimes you just gotta go at a couple empty boxes at 7am. In the yard of the City's water department. Where you work. Get a coworker to film it, if possible.
*(Starring me. And my roommate Summer of Hobo Siren.)
Everybody stares at the water meter installers in the neighborhood. Some come up to ask what we're doing, but they all do a huge double-take when they realize we are women.
If we go into any kind of store we get lots of attention in these crazy getups.
I think it's just a little unexpected to see girls in any sort of stereotypical male job. It's been a very interesting social experiment actually. And of course it only makes me feel super tough and strong. I like to do things like swing my pick ax or throw heavy things when people are watching.
Another thing I like to do when kids are getting on or off the school bus is to say, "Stay in school kids!" with a shrug of my shoulders, even though I KNOW they are thinking what a cool job I have. And it is cool. Really cool. Part of what we have to do is collect a bunch of the metal pit lids from in front of people's homes and deliver them to have holes drilled in them. Then we bring them back with the holes. I think we would be drilling the holes except I broke two drill bits on one hole. (The holes hold the radios that we install and program.) Anyway, for this part of our job, one of us drives and the other one of us rides in the back of the SUV with the hatch open. Our code word is "hop pop" when we're ready for the driver to drive to the next one. I use my pick ax to pry the lids up and this part of our job looks really cool, trust me. I always tell the kiddies that the holes are for putting quarters in. (I'm hoping I can get a secondary source of income.) Today I got a little girl to dig an entire hole for me. It took forever but hey, I needed the break.
I digress. The point of this post is to discuss gender disparity amongst manual labor workers.
Not really. Anyway, I've discussed before how I always feel like a dude because I look like this at work:
And we work. We work ten to twelve hours a day. I never wear makeup and I never get dressed up. When I get home I shower and put on my new pajama sweater dress I bought at Old Navy for $5.97 and fall asleep in a chair in front of reruns of 30 Rock at 8:45pm:
And Summer takes photos.
Today we decided we needed to do a "Treat Yo-self 2011!"...
...and got Pedicures next door to the FedEx office we frequent for paperwork shipments back to Minnesota. All the ladies at the shop stared and double-taked just as much as the neighbors when we're elbow-deep in their water meter pits.
We're pariahs. We don't fit in the man's world of basic plumbing and we don't fit in the woman's world of Asian pedicure shops.
Oh Well and Oh Man it felt good to look feel like a woman for 45 minutes.
It was about time for a new laptop, and so last summer I gathered up all my one dollar bills that I made from waitressing and bartending and brought them to the apple store and paid for a good chunk of the new Macbook Air. It took some getting used to, but I love it. It's wonderful and fast and smooth and clean and weighs nothing.
These days, after working eleven to twelve hours programming radios and digging holes for the water meter company, I go home and shower and put my pajamas on and then do some work on my beautiful laptop for the company in Minneapolis that I used to work for before this whole trip around the world thing. (My plan is to work like a dog for a few months and save up enough money for another epic trip.)
Last week I started to feel like I was going to catch a cold. So I added a tablet of Walborne (the poor man's Airborne) and a packet of Emergen-C to some hot water. I like to drink it like a tea and it usually helps me not catch the cold I thought I was catching.
So I was working, drinking my strange tea, and I don't know how it happened but I knocked the tea over and it poured onto my brand new beautiful laptop. Not just water, but sugary powdery thick water. What an idiot!
I said so many swear words while I ran to the kitchen to grab a paper towel and tip it upside down and try to dry out the keyboard.
I got it as dry as I could and washed it up with a soapy paper towel. But I was in the middle of a project for my old boss and so like an idiot I kept working even though the keys were all sticky and weird. I seriously didn't want this laptop anymore. Ew!
Soon I noticed that the 'h', j', 'k', and 'l', keys weren't working! Ugh...I finished the project copying and pasting and emailed my boss using the number '1' for 'l' and a '7' for 'k' and so on. I tipped the laptop upside down again on a paper towel and went to bed. The next morning the keys still weren't working. I kept it upside down some more and finally googled "spilling on your keyboard" and was horrified to discover I had probably just ruined my brand new expensive computer.
At work one of the guys has a neighbor who fixes computers though and I brought it in to him (an Australian!) and he took it all apart and found out that none of the moisture made it inside the computer and only my keyboard was trash. He said I was very lucky and the fact that there is no humidity here was probably a big factor. With a mac, that means replacing the whole top part of your laptop. Since I thought my whole computer was ruined when he quoted me $250 for the keyboard I almost did a cartwheel of joy.
$250. Almost the entire purchase price of my former netbook. The netbook that never got stolen or gave me any issues for two years. This is why I shouldn't ever have anything nice.
The Australian gave me this keybode to yooz whyle the paht taykes its toim getting hee-ah.
What an amazing and interesting blog post!
But that's one thing you never really talk about is it? How dependent we are on our technology and if it isn't working properly how much it can absolutely cripple us?
You may recall that about a year ago I met my Annie Wilkes. My number one fan, just like from the movie Misery. Well, the one, the only, the fabulous Blog fan Lisa* (names have not been changed) lives in Tucson, Arizona!
So when I heard that I would be working there for a water meter assignment, I contacted Lisa, who helped Summer and I secure the house we're renting. We arranged everything days before arriving, so we needed somebody in Tucson to receive the Fed-ex package with the keys, etc., and Lisa was our girl!
We were driving from Albuquerque, Summer had a paper due and we were late getting into town, so we didn't have any time to waste picking up the keys. Lisa understood and offered to meet us on the side of the freeway.
If I hadn't already met and fallen in love with her, if she weren't a friend of a very good friend of my sister's...it might have been a very strange and scary scene:
Blog stalker offers to help find housing
Blog stalker offers to receive keys to new apartment
Blog stalker in fact receives and has possession of keys to new apartment
Blog stalker offers to meet late at night on the side of the road next to a highway
Blog stalker distracts Blogger with praise for blog
Blog stalker stabs Blogger 37 times in chest and abdomen
Blog stalker leaves Blogger to bleed out on side of highway
Blog goes unupdated from that point on, leaving tens of other fans disappointed and confused
But that's not how it went. We met, we hugged, we laughed, we got Summer involved, we got the keys...and settled in to Oro Valley.
A few days later Lisa hooked us up with her good friend Roxanne* (names have not been changed) who graciously brought us to the Seguaro (pronounced Seh-wah-roh) National Monument just minutes from our town.
Those are saguaros. There are millions of them in this National Forest. Millions.
Roxanne is hilarious. She has a story of how she had told her husband that the reason she was putting on her nice underwear/bra combo was because she was going to the dermatologist. He was confused, because it was for an above-the-neck skin appointment. "And you have to undress for that?" "Yes," she said, "he has me completely undress and lay on the table and then he looks at the skin on my face. What? Is that weird?"
This is the only photo I have of her, as she prefers to be photographed from behind:
I knew I loved her when she told me that she also likes to pretend to use a tampon for chapstick....but I really, really, really love people who participate when I have a ridiculous photo idea.
So I'm totally a dude now. There are pros and cons, of course. When I used to work a desk job, I almost never had to use one of these: -- CON
Dig In!
But I also didn't get to look at stuff like this all day: -- PRO
I took this photo using my new iPhone app Instagram
Today a guy came out of his house with his wife and I heard her say, "who is that?" And he waved his hand and said, "oh, it's just the meter reader." -- CON
Then later we went to Home Depot to get supplies and this adorable Latina woman (think Gloria from Modern Family) said, "I love your vests! Where do you work? Where did you get those vests?" -- PRO
We take a break from the sun to eat lunch at a sit-down restaurant...and every day the wait staff says something like, "what'll it be ladies?" or "what'll you have, ladies?" And every day we wonder, "How did they know?" -- PRO / CON?
You might be wondering what exactly Summer and I are doing here in Arizona for work. And maybe you're not wondering at all. But I'm going to tell you.
We are living in one of the suburbs of Tucson, who hired my company to change all of their old brass water meters -- that needed manual reading -- to new meters with radios -- that will send the reading automatically. The meters are located in pits in people's front yards so we don't have to go into people's basements like we were doing in Michigan. The installers are doing the switch-outs, and Summer and I come along behind them and install the radio and then program it.
As Summer reported, we had heard all kinds of horror stories about what kind of critters we would find in the pits. Gila monsters, scorpions, rattle snakes, and black widow and brown recluse spiders. So far all I have seen are a lot of ants and crickets. The pits are a lot smaller and more shallow than I had imagined. There's not really room for a rattlesnake or gila monster, thank goodness.
But there is room for fashion!
As you can see, grass doesn't exist here. What they do have is dirt, dust and landscaping rocks. So I wear very attractive knee pads. That baseball cap and fluorescent vest complete an outfit of a grey company T-shirt and my black cargo pants that I have to roll up because they were already too short and the knee pads make them even shorter. "Where's the flood?" All my jeans show off my coin slot when I bend over, so I wear the black pants every day.
Sometimes two houses have their pits right next to each other, and so we have to dig around the pits and create a space for the wiring from one pit to be brought over to the other. So we have a pick axe and a shovel and we dig holes.
Don't let this adorable photo fool you, she mostly looks bad at work.
