Laid my 10,000th brick yesterday and it was a weird one

I was finishing a chimney stack on a house in Springfield, and the last brick I placed was this ugly, chipped reject from a pallet. My foreman laughed and said, 'That's the milestone marker.' It mattered because I'd been counting since my apprenticeship, aiming for that round number. Has anyone else had a funny or oddly perfect brick mark a big moment for them?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_linda2mo ago

I mean, I get that. It's never the shiny new thing, is it? My dad was a roofer and he always said the last shingle on a job was always the one with the weird tab or a factory smudge. Like it signed its work. He kept one from his first solo house in his toolbox for years, just this warped piece of asphalt.

alex_johnson2mo ago

My old truck has a dent in the tailgate from a pipe wrench that slipped in 2012, and I refuse to get it fixed. It's exactly that, @the_linda. The things we use get marked up, and those marks become the real story, not the perfect version from the store. I see it everywhere, from the scratched up mixing bowl my wife won't replace to the coffee mug with the chipped handle. We hold onto the flaws because they mean the thing was actually used for something real. Your dad's shingle is the same proof of work.

theajackson2mo ago

Used to want perfect stuff, but you're right.