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I occasionally feel angsty about not earning what I’m worth, which I usually check with remembering the freedom I’m provided at the day job… (Further evidence that my employer is a genius: Keep your worker-bees in a conflicted state of grateful but a little hungry and they’ll perform better.)

This is *not* about career angst…. I just felt the following statement needed some sort of anchor to keep it real:

I’M REALLY ENJOYING MY DAY JOB.

Of course I do – now I know why… Variety… The perfect pacifier for folks with normal attention spans… unlike ya’ll with Attention Surplus Disorder.

So.. last month I was standing on a floating platform in the Caribbean taking pictures of pirate ships…. Yesterday I got to hang out with our foreman and travel from jobsite to jobsite in The Grove taking pictures of our construction guys.

The purpose for the assignment was rather benign… The C.O.O. wanted a cheat-cheat sheet identifying faces with names with phonetic pronunciations for each.

Why? A lot of the guys are Russian immigrants and have exotic names like: Nijaz, Admir, Idriz, Jeugenius, Adyl, etc.

I assume we have so many because the head forman is Russian… He’s been with the bosses since the company was a husband and wife rehab team working out of an SUV . He’s bilingual and like 1st-generation immigrants, of any nationality, have a close-knit network for support…. So his carpenter friends came to work… and they had friends… and so on and so on..

The resulting effect is a trip.. Imagine being in a burnt-up transitional neighborhood walking around a partially restored century-old building and not a word of English being spoken around you…. A tinny portable CD boom box is playing a mix of Slav-Pop and old Scorpion’s metal tunes. (Russians are to The Scorpions as Germans are to David Hasslehoff as The French are to Jerry Lewis.) *I don’t make the rules – I only observe them and write them down.

Anyway… I can see why they call them Russian Bears….. Most of these guys are these little broad, sawed-off, hair-covered cuties. The language barrier masked my school-girl nerves while snapping off the quickie portraits oh look a chicken.