Getting Things Done

I am no builder and I certainly do not seek to criticize what I do not understand – what I am about to describe may be the only proper way to do it – but today whilst staring idly out of the office window working at my laptop I have had the opportunity to watch a builder working on the house behind us.  He had a fascinating and unchanging routine with a pleasing rhythm to it that lulled my senses and calmed my fractious spirit:
1. Take a single block off the pallet and place it close to where it was to be laid, at the opposite end of the building.
2. Leave trowel with block.
3. Walk whole length of new building to pick up bucket.
4. Walk back to block and pick up trowel.
5. Place trowel in bucket and walk to gobbo* hopper, at the original location of the bucket.
6. Remove trowel from bucket and place near hopper.  Fill bucket with gobbo.
7. Cross building with bucket to previously placed block.
8. Return to hopper for trowel.
9. Lay block.
10. Search for spirit level – find it where trowel used to be.
11. Level block.
12. Look at block from distance.
13. Look at block from side of hopper.  Leave spirit level there.
14. Consult mobile phone.
15. Start again.
Now, at no stage did he actually stop what he was doing (except for tea breaks and lunch obv) but neither did he vary it.  He never, for instance, laid out a number of blocks at once, he never filled his bucket with more gobbo than was sufficient for a single block, he never left his trowel or spirit level where they were needed.  The routine was so regimented, I figured that it must have been taught to him: this is the way that blocks had to be laid.  I can’t argue, I have never laid a block in my life, but I do have a friend who is a bricklayer and he gets paid for the number of bricks he lays each day.  I don’t see the above routine being particularly fruitful, salary-wise.

The impression is that he had been told ‘Look busy, but don’t do too much.’  Perhaps they didn’t want the house building until it had a buyer.  It did also occur that it might be a ‘Health and Safety’ issue: don’t leave blocks laying about – trip hazard; don’t carry too much gobbo in the bucket – heavy lifting risk; don’t do more than one thing at once – brain overload threat, but the more I watched him, the more I became certain that it was just the way that he did things.  (I also noticed that he was working, whilst I was drinking tea, dunking biscuits and staring out of the window, but that’s another story.)  All over the site people were working in pairs – one laying and levelling, the other fetching and carrying – but he worked alone, presumably not tolerated by, or tolerant of, others.  Throughout the day, more blocks and gobbo were delivered, but always left as far away from where he was working as possible.

I tried to see how old he (or she – it was hard to tell) was but so swaddled was he/she in various hi-viz layers, balaclava, hard hat, what might have been a beard, but also could have been a pet cat, that there was no way of telling.  It could have been an old person working at maximum capacity or a young person doing just enough to avoid the sack (or, of course vice versa).  One way or another, I couldn’t take my eyes off him/her (I even timed my own tea breaks to coincide with his** flask-visits, which meant that I also spent all afternoon having to stop for a pee.) which at least taught me one very valuable lesson: from tomorrow I am going to have to start writing with the blinds down, or else I’ll never get anything done…

*Builder’s mortar – I have no idea why.

**For ease – and to stop this blog hitting an all-time wasted pronoun count – I am going to settle on it being a ‘he’, if only because he appeared to have no friends.