Nine Years After Law School

This pic was taken in 2005. As you can see, I was busy touching it up with a black Sharpie. Why give out free advertising?

2005 was before the real estate bubble burst, when a lot of new homes were being built, and lots and lots of rennovations to existing homes were being done as well.

Painting, of course is part of that process.

Actually,  I stayed with this company for only a week, and ended up working with a different contractor shortly after this pic was taken.

So I cannot really say with accuracy who the people are in the picture, except for two or three.

But one day, we were working on a beautiful waterfront home on Eastern Long Island, and I was on an extension ladder painting sophets two stories up. Maybe 18 to 20 feet high.

One of the other guys in this picture was very chatty, and was painting a dormer directly above me, and sort of scrambling around on the moderately pitched cedar shingled roof.

Anyway, he slipped, and slid to the very edge of the roof.

Fortunately, for both of us, he stopped in time, or he would have taken me down with him, ladder, paint and all. For a moment I thought I was a goner, and had that adrenaline rush one gets in the solar plexus. You know the feeling?

Anyway, during his slide, the painter spilled about half a gallon of latex paint all over the roof, and the next hour was spent by himself  and another painter in hosing the roof down and scrubbing it with a plastic bristle brush.

It has been my experience in the trade that every contractor works a little differently. This particular Company was ladder happy. They had ladders everywhere. And the office had lots of pics of houses with many, many extension ladders leaning against them.

I think the rationale was that the painters would thereby spend more time painting, and less time would be spent in moving the ladders around, which would be done by a "Helper" on the ground, who made a lower wage.

An interesting theory, but I really don't ascribe to it.

Now, no blogger has ever asked me if I had actually found legal employment after Law School.
I did, of course, between 1997 and 2000. But that is for another post. Also, in 2006 I worked as an Insurance Salesman.

(For the record, to get a job as a Painter , I learned that one must never mention that one has a College Degree, let alone a degree in Law)