The Shop and The Painter

What makes a successful shop?  Is it the tools?  The plans?  The Materials? A great building? All these things are important but the critical piece is the people.  In many businesses people, like machinery or materials are simply cogs on a wheel.  Not so in our shop. 

Is it the creativity, the work ethic, the attention to detail that makes the people the key element?  Hardly.  It is the personalities of the characters that make it a place that builds such beautiful things. 

In our shop we are an all male crew.  Not that this is in anyway essential to the running of the place but as you will see in my writings to come it’s a factor in the dynamic.  What happens when you set 6 guys loose in a shop filled with potential and enthusiasm?  Well I’ll tell you.  You get some work done (occasionally it seems), the jokes that the universe became tired of a millennium ago are still funny and the toilet paper never quite seems to make it on the roll.

I am not trying to make light of the guys I work with.  Our painter is 13 feet tall, ok... 6 foot 7 but anyone taller than me when sitting on a stool while I am standing is 13 feet tall to me. It seems that he has become the favourite target for the inside jokes in the shop going back as far as I can remember.  In a wood shop the painter’s life is a solitary one.  All alone with nothing but the sound of the compressor and the hiss of paint would be enough to send me screaming from the room.  Not him, kitted out in overalls, gloves, a mask and the recently ever present IPod , which I am sure has all of Barry Manilow’s greatest love songs on it, he cheerfully goes about his work without much in the way of fuss or comment.

Last year the hermit like nature of his work got the paint room temporarily renamed “The Cave”.  After sealing him in and posting signs for a week we had to call a stop to it because, it seemed, everyone had become as interested in the “project” as they called it as getting any work done.  Through the whole ordeal he smiled in his own shy way, cracked back an occasional comeback but mostly just shook his head at the absurdity of it all and carried on.  

When he went on vacation recently it came to me rather suddenly one day.  Though he never says much the shop seems quieter without him. I guess this is one piece that makes this shop a family.

When you are in the store looking at our furniture remember the 13 foot tall painter and I dare you not to get Barry Manilow stuck in your head.  Talk to you soon.

Jack