‘I’ve been too scared to go to work’: my life as a builder in badly behaved Britain
I have been a builder since I was a teenager. I have also worked as a fisher and a tree surgeon, but I always return to building, because it’s the one thing I think I’m good at.
We get all sorts of awkward customers – especially after a job has been completed. Once, I was called at 5am: a towel rail was hanging 45 degrees off the wall. When I arrived at the property, the husband looked terribly sheepish and the wife said: “It just fell off.” She took the kids to school while the husband said: “OK, what do we need to fix it?”
I bolted it back on, but when the wife returned she said: “We’re not paying. It was clearly your mistake.” I imagine the husband had tripped over a kid’s toy, or something, and ripped it off the wall.
On another occasion, I had been called to fix a roof that required re-slating. It took a couple of days. After I had finished the job, I got a call from the client, who said the slates were falling off.
When I went back, there were all these ladders – clearly, they had been up to have a look at the roof, not trusting that I had completed the job properly. They must have been wobbling around and broken some of the slates, which had fallen off. They insisted no one had been up there. It took me another two or three hours to fix it – unpaid, again, because supposedly it was my fault.
There has always been bad behaviour to contend with in this job. When I started as a teenager, I was working with a friend, whose father was also a builder, and we got too scared to go to work. The customer – a woman in her 40s – was wearing less and less clothing each day we turned up. She kept saying: “Have you got a girlfriend?” I was still at sixth form college and terrified, so we bailed on the job.
I also know a painter who
Read more on theguardian.com
