I couldn’t believe how quickly it happened. It was really quite amazing. As I watched the site supervisor frantically place a wheelie bin under the first sprinkler to go off, I couldn’t help but find the whole scene humorous. I mean, the poor guy knew the amount of water those things emit, and he knew once the first sprinkler went off that the rest were destined to blow. And yet he still tried to contain the inevitable flood that was about to ensue with that useless bin. It took all of ten seconds for that full-sized bin to overflow. And it took all of a minute for the rest of the sprinklers in the east wing of the airport to leave everyone standing in a foot of water…
Back in 2014, I spent a year working 70 hours a week at Perth’s international airport. 12 hours a day Monday to Friday, and as my boss used to say as if it was actually some sort of consolation, “only 10 hours on a Saturday”. I worked as a Wall and Ceiling Fixer, which is the trade I fell into after my affinity for teenage drug use saw me drop out of high school in a blaze of marijuana scented glory. For reasons unbeknownst to me, this trade goes by many names, such as (but certainly not limited to): Gyprocker, Gypy, Sheetrocker, Drywaller, Flusher, and even though Plastering is an entirely different trade, that doesn’t seem to stop us Wall and Ceiling Fixer’s from routinely being mistaken for Plaster’s as well.
Now, since I don’t want to bore you with any unnecessary information about a trade that most couldn’t care less about (including me) I will just say one thing… Us ‘Sheetrockers’ are usually compartmentalised into three sub-categories. Gridders: the ones who build the steel wall and ceiling frames. Sheeters: the ones who sheet the frames with plasterboard. And Flushers: the ones who plaster the joins between the sheets so that the walls and ceilings in places like shopping centres, apartments, and in this case the airport, look like one nice flat surface. I tell you this because there is an unspoken hierarchy amongst us ‘Drywallers’ where the Gridders rule the roost, followed by the Sheeters, and then shit-kicking along at the bottom of this hierarchy of deluded self-importance are the Flushers. I worked as a Flusher. In other words, my role for that insufferably long year was to quite literally smooth over all the fuckups that the ‘Gypy’s’ higher up the ladder were too ‘important’ to get to.
I guess I should also explain, given the cattiness of my tone, why I decided to commit myself to working such long hours in a role that I did not like one fucking bit. I was saving as much money as possible so that my friend and I could go on a skateboarding trip to the United States to skate all the amazing spots we’d seen in the countless skate videos that illuminated our bedrooms every night. But this piece isn’t about America, or skateboarding, or the internal politics of a trade I have long since left. It’s about a few amusing mishaps that coloured that otherwise monotonous year I spent working at Perth’s International airport.
One of the requirements of working at the airport is that all personnel must obtain an ASIC’s card. I can’t remember what the acronym stood for, but it was essentially a security clearance that enabled us to enter restricted parts of the airport. So, you would think, given that I’d received the coveted security clearance, the airport management would let me carry my open buckets of wet white plaster through the airport’s security checkpoint without having to get them scanned by the X-ray machine. But alas, the airport bigwigs had to follow ‘protocol’, which meant this was not allowed. Not at first anyway… But all that changed when the plastic flaps that hang at the entrance of the X-ray machine, decided to take a dip in my open buckets, before proceeding to paint the suitcases of soon-to-be-travelers with streaks of wet white plaster. At first, no one seemed to know what was going on. Clean suitcases were being put on the conveyer belt to be X-rayed, and plaster covered suitcases were coming out the other end as if like magic. And the magic didn’t stop there because lord knows if some mysterious gunk magically appears on your suitcase, you must unthinkingly touch it to see what it is. And so, not only did yours truly dirty a bunch of passenger’s belongings just before they caught their flight, but he also dirtied their hands just before they picked up their freshly X-rayed wallets, phones, and passports (whoopsie). Interestingly enough, once a few disgruntled passengers complained, the airport management seemed to have a change of heart about enforcing the all-important protocol as the mess I’d caused seemed to miraculously convince them that I wasn’t trying to smuggle a bomb through the security check point in a bucket of plaster.
I’ve suffered a few blows to the head over the years. Like the time I slipped out at Vic Park skatepark and hit the back of my head off the concrete so hard I knocked myself out. When I came to, I thought there was an earthquake as the whole world seemed to be shaking. I later realised that ‘shaking’ was my brain rattling around in my skull. There was the time I was sparring this guy from my old boxing gym who was 30 kilos heavier than me, and instead of “ducking and moving” as my boxing coach suggested, I decided to stand toe-to-toe with the guy and punch him as hard as I could in the face. To my dismay, this behemoth hardly even noticed my punch. In fact, it seemed so inconsequential to him that instead of falling to the floor dead, (which was what I imagined would happen) he actually had the nerve to say, “good punch”, before delivering his own, mighty-fine punch. That was the day I realised boxing wasn’t for me. And then there was the time I got attacked at the airport by my orbital sander… First some context. Back then, I felt it was appropriate to match my voracious marijuana consumption with what can only be described as the most beautifully free flowing dark brown dreadlocks to ever adorn the head of some white kid from the suburbs. And while I’m sure there was some rule about tying your hair up – just like there were rules about wearing safety glasses, earmuffs, and hardhats – at the time of the incident, my luscious locks were not tied up. Which is how one of them got sucked into the motor of the orbital sander I was using. At first, I didn’t know what happened. One minute I was busily sanding away, the next, “BAM” I’ve been sucker-punched, or so I thought. But as I let go of the sander so that I could turn around and start raining fists of hellfire down upon my assailant (just like I used to in the boxing gym) I noticed that my sander did not comply to the normal laws of physics. Instead of obeying gravity and falling to the floor it just hung by my side – suspended by the dreadlock that had sent it rocketing into the side of my head. Once I cut myself free of that unwanted hair accessory, I decided it was time. And so, that night I said farewell to my beloved dreads.
An affliction I bear as a ceiling fixer is that I am always examining the ceilings of whatever fine establishment I find myself. And make no mistake – this is an affliction. After all, who wants to think about, no less look at, their work when they’re not at work? But for whatever reason I can’t seem to help it, my neck just habitually cranes skywards whenever I enter a building and it doesn’t return to sea-level until I have a good grasp of the landscape above. I say this because I know that most people are lucky enough not to share my affliction, which means most people don’t take too much notice of how plain, shabby, slanted, water damaged, or cracked the ceilings are in most places (you just looked at the ceiling above you, didn’t you?). Nor do most people think about how some poor sap on a ladder, or in this case a scissor-lift, had to ascend to the top of the dizzyingly high ceiling in the airports east wing just to smooth over some barely visible crack that no one’s ever gonna notice. And they certainly don’t consider how much damage one of those scissor-lifts can cause when it goes a little too close to the wildly expensive floor-to-ceiling windows that line the east wing of the airport… I was working nearby when I heard it. Moments before the site was singing it’s normal cacophonous droll – drill’s drilling, angle grinder’s grinding, hammer’s hammering, tradie’s yelling vulgar shit, and the metronomic hum of a scissor-lifts reverse siren. Then, “muda-fucking-BOOM!” It sounded like two cars were playing chicken and neither one flinched. In the brief moments immediately after the impact, just like in the brief moments between when lightning strikes and the thunder resounds, there was an air of eerie silence. Everyone needed a moment to compute what they had just witnessed – I mean, it’s not every day you see a huge-mechanical-dinosaur barge through a sheet of glass. Then came the commotion, which was rung in by a chorus of obscenities.
It was an accident… I didn’t mean to bump that sprinkler head. I was flushing a join alongside the sprinkler when I heard a metallic ‘ting’. “Ohh fuck”, I thought. My trowel had ever so slightly grazed that waiting-water-bomb. But it seems ‘grazing it’ was all that was needed to trigger that unstoppable downpour. In that moment it felt like I entered a scene from the matrix as everything went in slow-motion. All at once I saw my trowel bump the sprinkler, the red-glass-tube inside the sprinkler shatter, and then before my hand had even returned to my side – the sky had opened. Just as quickly as all that happened, my body instinctually carried me down the ladder and as far away from the scene of the crime as possible. Then time seemed to go back to normal, as my reactions had done what they could to camouflage my culpability. Now I was no longer the perpetrator, but rather just a witness watching all the wet-and-wild chaos ensue. And boy, what a slippin-sliding-mess it was. There were tradie’s scurrying to save their tools, bosses scrambling to cover their building materials, and soon-to-be traveler’s running out of the airport in a desperate attempt to escape the water that was raining down upon them. That’s when the site supervisor rushed by me with that useless bin.
When I think back on it now, it feels like that sprinkler mishap occurred one day and then the very next day I was at the airport with my friend waiting for our flight to America. Of course, that’s not how it went down. Instead, there were many more monotonous months in between. But in my mind those two moments are connected. See, as I sat there waiting to board, I found myself once again staring up at those damn ceilings. And that’s when my tear-ducts finally gave out and another unstoppable downpour begun. Triggered by the knowing that my time working at that godforsaken place was over.
Michael Edward I love this! Such a pleasurable read first thing. Made me laugh out loud even a few mirthful tears.
The hair debacle🤣
The sprinkler debacle🤣
I am literally laughing out loud🤣