When M.(our Romanian day labourer for the last few months) hadn't shown up by 9am, we started to worry. Our relief at hearing the door open at 9.05am, however, was vey short lived - M was upset, he had come to pick up his tools, return the keys, and leave, never to return. Isn't 9am too early for melodrama?! It was either a simple misunderstanding, or M. was taking the mickey and wanted more money—but we never figured out which it was, because by 9.10am, he was gone for good.
I absolutely could not believe it when I heard André say “It’s fine. I can finish the roof myself”. Fortunately, I didn’t have time to stand there getting stressed about the situation, since I had to go to work. But within a few hours, André had figured everything out!
As it turns out, laying roofing tiles is very precise, but relatively straightforward and light work, so it can feasibly be a one-person job (unlike some of the structural stuff we were doing earlier). It will go more slowly than if we had more than one pair of hands on it--but the money we will now save on labour will enable us to put more resources into the next big job, the plumbing. And André seems to be quite enjoying this work! He’s calling it methodical, but “meditative”. So it seems that in a way, M. walking off in a huff was, strangely enough, for the best.
