744: Essential
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. From WBZChicago, it's This American Life, I'm Hannah Joffey Walt sitting in for Ira Glass. I've been talking to people lately about their jobs. Something is going on with jobs right now. People are leaving them, they want to leave them, where we do our jobs is changing, what we do, and have been especially interested in people who are designated essential workers. I think for the stay-at-home types, people like me, our jobs changed in very obvious ways. But for people who continue to go to work in person, their jobs change too, but those changes were sometimes less visible. For example, Carrie Breen, he's a carpenter, works for the New York City Department of Education, fixing things in schools. During last year, when all the schools shut down for COVID, Carrie wasn't sure what that meant for him. Until he heard, "No, no, no, no, no, he should still come in, report to work." Well, the fact that they deemed us essential, I kind of founded a little comic only beginning. That door is creaked for years, that floor is creaked for years. All said in today, it's an emergency, or it's essential. It's not like he was a doctor or a grocery store worker. Most of our work is repairing floors, doors, ceilings that are down, bathrooms fall in a part. Do you have a favorite sort of task? Like on Monday morning, if you get assigned doors, or you're like, "Ah, more doors, or is there one that you really like?" I wouldn't say there's a favorite. My favorite is when the building has an elevator, because you'll get doors on the fifth floor of a building, and you've got to carry doors that weigh potentially a couple of hundred pounds up, and then back down. Kerry is practical in this way. Kerry's been a carpenter for 35 years. He's also a volunteer firefighter. Irish talks about his kids a lot. So he's going to work, and they're getting a lot done, because there's no kids around. With the COVID, school's empty, things were getting painted, things were getting fixed. I've never seen the schools look so good. And then, April, a couple of weeks after the school's closed, Kerry goes in for his team meeting, where they tell everyone what they're working on next. I believe, like, Thursday or Friday afternoon, my boss said, "We've got a project coming up next week, and we're going to start to build coffins." He repeated it, "We'll be building coffins for the City of New York." Nobody in the shop believed it, like, you know, "Get out here, build coffins." And he produced a set of plans and showed him to us, and he said, "We're going to start the next week." Monday morning, Kerry goes to work. And we had to go to a high school into a gymnasium that was set up as a rudimentary shop with... A high school gymnasium, like, with, like, basketball lines on the floor, kind of thing? Yes.
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