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It Always Boils Down to Penis Jokes

Sunday I sat on the floor just inside the front door, my finger holding a leaking radiator closed.

"I feel like the little Dutch kid," I said over my shoulder to Angus, who was frantically getting bits and pieces together to stop our hallway from a flood of Biblical proportions (OK, it wouldn't be Biblical. It'd actually been leaking for days and we'd stuck an old Gerber baby bottle under the leak, but the leak was getting worse so repairs were needed.)

"Why's that?" he asked.

"You know, my finger in the dyke and all that," I answered.

He came into the hallway. "Yeah, but your people aren't big on plugging dams. Don't your people sit on their big front porches with a giant shot gun and shout 'Get off my land!' to people?"

"We might be breaking up soon," was my response to his petty regionalism.

The building work is ongoing. We did fix the radiator, because our assumption that "we'll just throw the radiators away sometime soon" wasn't coming soon enough. The Gerber bottle - no longer fit for purpose - hovers under the radiator like some kind of talisman to ward off future leaks.

Our house looks like a tornado hit it. Seriously. The entire front garden is covered with rubble, which a giant claw-bearing truck comes and picks up periodically.

Those are two of the builders on the right-hand side of the pic (Pants? You there? How soon can you come over and help translate?) Our entire front yard is basically buried under various bits and pieces. The grass will die, but there's nothing we can do about it.

The garage virtually exploded last week, and a new roof and new doors are going on it.

To the right you can see all the grey blocks that make up the new exterior wall of our extension.

Nothing quite prepares you though for the back of the house.

It's a disaster area.

Or the fact that the wall making up our living room is coming down.

I asked The Cowboy when we'd need to take the satellite dish down.

"We can take it down for you, and put it back up when the work is all done," was his reply.

"All done as in 14 weeks from now?" I ask.

"Yeah, that's right."

I take a deep breath. "OK, that's not happening. I need the dish back up right away."

"Why's that?" he asked with puzzled brow.

"Two words, Cowboy: 'I'm American'. TV is a part of my soul, and I'm not ashamed to admit that. If I lose TV people lose their limbs, got it?"

"Got it."

The builders and I have been getting on better, actually. We've learned their patterns - when they need to pee they do it somewhere in the garden (I don't want to know where). If they need to do more, they come inside and use our downstairs toilet. I don't know what the hell they're eating, but we've learned that they'll be in there a while, they always need a double flush, and that it's best to leave the window in there permanently open during the day.

Red Bull is unfailingly polite to me and I'm ok with that. I am the dispensary actually, usually dispensing paracetamol (Tylenol). I handed some out to him yesterday as he had a toothache due to, as he put it, "he got a bit of a smack in the face" Friday night. He showed me where two teeth had been broken off, so I reckon his interpretation of a smack and my interpretation of a smack don't align. I overheard him on the phone giving out full details of his Friday escapades - he went to a bar with a girl and wound up trying to get off with not one but two different girls while there. He started a bar brawl, got thrown out of the place, and went home with one of the girls he was trying to pick up. The girl he originally went to the bar with is pissed off with him for hitting on two girls and shagging one of them.

Sounds so unreasonable of her.

The Cowboy and I have started talking too. We talk about construction issues and things that need doing. I can't say I'm comfortable with the talks, since I am no visionary when it comes to either building or, you know, style, but I try. The one line we've drawn is electrics - he tried to talk to me about them and we had to make our relationship clear.

"And about the circuits, we need to install a-" he started.

"See," I interrupted. "I don't do electrics. Angus does electrics. Angus lives for electrics. I just blew a circuit when you started talking about circuits. Not my bag, man."

At this he laughs.

What was it that blew open the iron curtain? Was it my striving to knock down the walls of gender stereotype? Was it my desire to have women treated as equals? Was it my fight to ensure that I was taken seriously as a woman and an engineer?

No.

It was when The Cowboy was telling me a measurement. He told me that something needed to be moved 6 inches. He then got out his tape measure and the measurement actually turned out to be 2 inches.

I was only on my first cup of coffee that morning, and the mouth-brain connection was still engaged.

"God, trust a man to estimate a measurement bigger than it really is," I muttered. Then I realized what I said. I froze. The men all froze. They looked at me.

Every last one of them fell about laughing.

It wasn't my desire to be considered an equal that melted the frozen relationship.

It was a penis joke.

-H.

Posted by Everydaystranger at April 16, 2008 07:50 AM • TrackBack .

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