A Badly Constructed Question

The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard at work actually came from my mouth. It was when I first started with the cleaning company I’m with now. A lot of times, if we approach a construction site soon enough, we can win the bid for the post-construction clean-up, which is a nice score.

I had a friend of mine who was in the sanitation business bringing me around the Manhattan area, and I’m a big guy, but the situations were just nuts. It was so loud, you had to yell, but you didn’t want them to think you were yelling at them, so you had to tread lightly. Construction workers are rough and short-tempered; if they think you’re yelling at them instead of just yelling over the noise, they go nuts.

I walked up with my friend to the General Contractor and he introduced me. The first words out of my mouth:

Me: “Hey, cool, so are you guys building up or…?”

They both looked at me like, “Or what?!”

In my defense, I had just read an article about earthscrapers — the opposite of skyscrapers — but nonetheless, when we got back in the car, my friend turned to me and said:

Friend: “Don’t you ever ask somebody if they’re building up again. You sound like an idiot.”

I learned my lesson that day.