I’m working with a guy who has decided to tell me his entire life story, in between smoke breaks and trying to convince me the moon is hollow and that the earth’s gravitational pull is not enough to retain such a proportionally large satellite. Apparently his wife cut him off from sex a long time ago, and it caused the part of his brain that discerns facts to atrophy. He feels trapped in the marriage for pretty legitimate reasons, so neither of them are going anywhere. Bear in mind that this is the BEST journeyman I could be working with right now, and I picked him on purpose to protect myself from the other one, who has the communication skills of an angry badger on mescaline.

“I worked out on the peninsula for this one outfit, and the daughter of the owner, she’s was CRAZY. Do you know about the hot/crazy scale?”

“Yes,” I said, tightening a nut onto some all thread. This was not easy because the lift was jiggling around as he was exclaiming about this hot/crazy lady.

“We ran away for 72 hours together. We spent the whole time making out. And then I went home to my wife again.” He sighed.

The funny thing is, when I started, he was acting more restrained and the other journeyman, the badger, told the boss that Mr. Creepy was hitting on me and I had complained. None of that was true. Sometimes in a weird dynamic it is best if the journeymen use all their ammo taking potshots at each other, because then they’re not gunning for you.

“It’s just not fair,” Mr. Creepy complained, in front of several young electricians who looked more uncomfortable than I felt. “It’s so much easier for you women to just get a, you know, thing that can replace men.”

“Uh, you guys have Fleshlights?” I said. This is all happening while I was cutting down a piece of duct with a portaband and he was watching me work.

“Yes, but that doesn’t have BOOBS. I got this realistic doll thing…”

“A Real Doll or just a torso?”

“The Real Dolls are too expensive! And this thing was great until it broke. I had to call the company and tell them that it was, you know, too small.” Somehow, as this motherfucker was telling me about his limbless sex torso, he was also working in that he was too well-endowed for it to contain his massive logjam of +17 to masculinity. “They offered to just replace the, uh…”

“The vagina,” I said. So many questions I didn’t want to ask were not coming to my mind.

“Yeah! So they wanted to replace it, but I said, ‘What’s the point if the same thing’s going to happen again?”

“What indeed.”

“And it was kind of a pain in the ass because I had to use this tool to like, douche it out with this tool that went into the top of the head and through the bottom of the thing…”

“Like a plunger thing?” I asked.

“Yeah!”

I shrugged. “Yeah I have to do the same thing after sex. I have a little hole back here–” I said, indicating the back of my neck.

“But YOU GALS. You can replace US for like, six dollars.” Mr. Creepy waved his drill around and looked very triumphant at this point.

“You’re not making a great argument for the continued existence of your gender.”

“I KNOW! And you can go to like, China, and adopt babies there…”

“And raise them and have sex with THEM,” I finished, pointing at him.

“THAT’S IT, I’M TAKING A SMOKE BREAK.”