One time when I was working with another fellow, he received a visit from one of his friends while we were on the job.  This friend told him he was leaving town.  After he left the job, my partner told me what was happening.

His friend had checked his bank account and he had way too much money in it.  He drew it all out in cash and was leaving town before the bank caught the mistake.

I asked my partner if he was sure the money hadn’t come out of his own account.  For the rest of the day he looked a little worried.  He must have gone right to the bank after work to check.  The next morning he told me he had checked his bank account and he was O.K.

My wife and I had a similar thing happen, but it had a different ending.

We would get paid on Friday.  The banks were closed on Saturday and Sunday.  The bank had arranged for us to have prepared deposit slips and envelopes so that we could take the Friday paycheck, endorse it, place it in an envelope with the deposit slip, and deposit it in a night depository.  Then we could write checks on the money all weekend as we needed to.  At the time, small town banks were very cooperative in matters like this.

One day we received a bank statement with way too much money in our account.  It wasn’t a round number difference either.  We couldn’t imagine who would deposit money into our account.  My wife, Becky, went down to the bank to see what was going on.

While the bank people were tracking it down, a Native American woman was pacing the floor and loudly declaiming about cheaters and crooks.  She had deposited her husband’s paycheck in the night depository and never received credit for it.

Apparently the bank had given her deposit slips and envelopes with our name and account number on it.  She had not noticed the wrong name and account number.

The bank managed to straighten it out.  I do think we saved a couple of bank employees from getting a very bad hair cut that day.

Working men generally tend to get along by using friendly razzing.  I remember one shop where we had a good variety of ethnic groups.  On boy was of Japanese descent.  Another boy was Italian.  Another one was French and one boy was Irish.  One guy had an easy name to read, “Brown.”  However I think he was just a run of the mill Caucasian with nothing strikingly different about his ethnicity.  Myself, I am Swiss/German, but I was mostly razzed about my farm boy background.

One day the Irish guy made a joke about Italians that would be considered politically incorrect today.  Everyone laughed, including the Italian guy.

The Japanese guy was more or less the foreman.  One time he had written out instructions for a job and sent the Irishman to do it.  The Irishman came back that night and told the foreman he couldn’t read his handwriting.  The Japanese boy took the slip and said; “Well it says…”

He hesitated, walked over to where the light was better and said; “It says….”  He paused and handed the slip back to the Irishman.  He said;”What’s the matter?  Can’t you read Japanese?”

In that shop the Boss had a good sense of humor also.  I remember when he was standing on the top of a five foot ladder trying to reach some light fixtures on a shelf.  His wife, who worked in the office, came back to the warehouse and saw him standing on the top step of the ladder.  Knowing it wasn’t a good idea, she asked if he wanted her to get him a different ladder.  He looked down at the ladder and said; “No thank you.  This one is almost too short as it is.”

I used to get a lot of razzing about being so skinny.  One time a bunch of us were outside eating our lunch on a hot sunny day.  It never took us a full ½ hour to eat our lunch so there were usually a few minutes to relax.

I would usually lay in the shade of a telephone pole.  The trouble with that was that as the sun moved so did the shade.  There was a few times my rolling around trying to stay in the shade of a telephone pole prompted reminders about how skinny I was.

At a different employer we would hire some summer help.  One was a young boy who was in High School in the fall, winter and spring.  Another was a High School shop teacher.  By coincidence they knew each other from school and the two would razz each other constantly over the summer.

One time the Shop Teacher was on a ladder working on something above his head.  The student, looking for a ladder he could use, came over to him and asked: “How long are you going to need that ladder?”

The shop teacher very deliberately looked down at the ladder and counted the rungs; “One, … Two, … Three” out loud.  Then he looked at the student and said; “About 3 feet.”

One time we were remodeling a hotel in Havre, Montana.  One of the electricians was a Coca-Cola addict.  Every day at coffee break he would buy a half dozen bottles of Coke and hand them out to us.  I think he thought he was doing us a favor.  After about a week of it, I started feeling ill, like my insides were rotting away.  I insisted on going back to a coffee break.

The manager of the hotel was a young fellow and he worked with us much of the time.  He explained to us that many times people would leave bottles of hair spray behind when they checked out.  He insisted that hair spray made excellent bug killer.  He used it in his garden, flower beds and shrubs.  He said you couldn’t buy anything that worked better.

There were a couple of painters working on the job with us.  As soon as we finished work in a room, the painters came in and painted them.  They were also putting up wall paper in the hallway.

One day one of the painters was painting the ceiling in the hallway.  (This was an old fashioned building with high ceilings.)  As he cautiously descended the ladder he stepped directly into an open 5-Gallon paint bucket.  His demeanor changed to what might be adequately described as “extremely agitated.”

He kicked the bucket off of his foot.  The bucket went sailing down the hallway, splashing paint everywhere.  He picked up his brushes and left the job, never to return!  He didn’t even stop to get his pay check.

On a different job we found ourselves working with a paint crew again.  The job was a rush job.  Everyone was working overtime.

One painter was painting away with tears running down his face.  We asked what was wrong.  He said his wife had died the day before, but he had to keep working because of the rush.

Many years later I was doing some work for his nephew in Spokane.  His nephew remembered the occasion.

Painters have problems too.