Howdy, folks. Glen Blamstead here, reporting live from the cab of my truck, where I have just spent forty-five minutes looking for a clipboard that I am currently sitting on. I am not joking. I shifted my weight, heard a crunch, and there it was: the spring inventory checklist I made three weeks ago, now bearing the distinct contour of my left thigh and a coffee stain that looks vaguely like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is my system. It is not a good system. But it is, undeniably, a system.
The Truck: A Mobile Archaeological Dig
My truck has layers. Not on purpose. It has simply accumulated strata over the winter like some kind of mobile sedimentary formation. The top layer is recent: a pair of gloves, a half-empty thermos, and a receipt for a breakfast sandwich I don't remember eating. Below that is the mid-winter layer: a ice scraper, a balaclava, and a printout of a quote I was supposed to follow up on in February. And then, deep in the Precambrian zone beneath the passenger seat, there are things that science can no longer explain.
Last Tuesday I found a bag of deer corn behind the seat. I do not deer hunt. I do not know anyone who deer hunts who would borrow my truck for that purpose. The corn was dated 2019. It had achieved a kind of geological stability. I considered carbon-dating it. I considered just leaving it there, since it had clearly found a home. In the end I threw it out, but I felt guilty about it, which I recognize is irrational. The corn had become part of the ecosystem.
I also found a tape measure I reported stolen in 2021. It was not stolen. It was in the truck, hiding inside a hollowed-out space that used to contain a first-aid kit. The first-aid kit, incidentally, is still missing. I suspect the tape measure ate it. I have fourteen tape measures. I can only find the one that doesn't retract properly. It just hangs there, limp and judgmental, like a dog that knows you forgot to feed it.
My "Filing System"
I do not believe in drawers. Drawers are where information goes to die. If I cannot see it, it does not exist. This is why every flat surface in my shop — and several that are not technically flat — is covered in paper. Quotes, measurements, phone numbers written on the backs of envelopes, a napkin from a diner in St. Cloud with what appears to be a truss diagram on it. I know where everything is, provided nobody moves it and provided I am standing in exactly the right spot when I need it.
My wife, Diane, once bought me a filing cabinet. A nice one. Metal. Color-coded folders. I used it for three days and then filled the drawers with nuts and bolts because I was out of storage bins and the filing cabinet was right there. She opened it expecting to find tax documents and found forty pounds of lag screws instead. She didn't say anything. She just made that sound — the one that means she has accepted something without approving of it. I have heard that sound approximately six thousand times in our marriage.
I once wrote a customer's phone number on my hand. This was not a young-man mistake. I was sixty-four at the time. I washed my hands for lunch, the number disappeared, and to this day I do not know who called or what they wanted. They have probably built three buildings by now with someone else. I don't blame them. If I called a contractor and he answered with a pencil behind his ear and a phone number disappearing off his knuckles in real time, I would also question my life choices.
My Relationship with Technology
The office has scheduling software. I call it "the robot." The robot tells me where to be and when. I do not trust the robot. The robot does not understand that I need to stop for coffee, or that the gas station with the good coffee is not on the route the robot chose, or that I accidentally left my level at the last job and need to circle back. The robot thinks in straight lines. I think in spirals. We have an uneasy relationship.
Diane put a Tile tracker on my keys last Christmas. I lost the phone that finds the Tile. I found the phone three days later in the refrigerator, next to a leftover container I also didn't remember packing. The keys were in the ignition. The truck was running. I had been sitting in the driveway for twenty minutes wondering why I felt cold. I am not senile. I am just... densely populated. There is a lot going on in here, and not all of it is organized.
What the Crew Thinks
I know they have a betting pool. I pretend I don't know, but I know. Every morning they wager on what I will forget. Phone? Wallet? The specific wrench I said I'd bring? My own middle name? (It's Everett. I forget it sometimes too. It doesn't come up.) The current record holder is Jake, who correctly predicted I would drive to a job site with my coffee on the roof. It stayed there for eleven miles. I took a corner in Mora and it achieved orbit. I have never seen the crew move that fast. They scattered like quail.
They also keep a whiteboard in the break room of 'Glen-isms.' Things I say that make sense to me in the moment and to absolutely no one else. 'If the hole's too big, make the post bigger.' 'The level doesn't lie, but sometimes it needs a minute to think about it.' 'That ain't going nowhere, except maybe slightly downhill.' I stand by all of them. Context is everything.
The Sandwich
I need to tell you about the sandwich. It was a ham and cheese on rye. I made it on a Tuesday in April. I put it in my toolbox because the truck was full and I needed both hands to carry a post bracket. I am not proud of this decision. I am simply reporting the facts. I found the sandwich in July. It had become something else by then. Something with its own gravity. I buried it behind the shop with the same solemnity I reserve for dead squirrels. The toolbox still smells like regret. Diane will not ride in the truck. She says it smells like 'choices.' She is not wrong.
Why Sherman Buildings Still Functions
Here's the thing, and I want to be clear about it because this is important: Sherman Buildings has been putting up post-frame structures since 1976, and not one of them has been organized the way I organize my truck. Not one of them has relied on my memory for where the screws are. Not one of them has involved a sandwich in a toolbox.
My personal chaos is exactly that: personal. It lives in my truck and my shop and the right thigh pocket of my Carhartts. It does not live in our build process. We have checklists. We have digital project tracking. We have inventory systems that know where every post, every truss, every fastener is supposed to be, and if something's missing, the system flags it before I even realize I forgot to order it. Which I have. Twice. The system caught it both times. The system is better than me. I am fine with this.
The young guys on the crew — the ones who bet on my forgetfulness — they are the ones who actually run the jobsites now. They use the app. They follow the checklist. They don't put sandwiches in toolboxes. And when they have a question, they don't ask me where I wrote it down. They pull it up on a tablet. It's beautiful. I don't understand half of what the tablet does, but I respect it. I have seen it do things in thirty seconds that would have taken me three days of searching through truck strata.
I like to think that my chaos served a purpose. That fifty years of losing tape measures and forgetting phone numbers taught this company what happens when you rely on one person's memory. That every time I walked onto a job without the right fitting, someone in the office quietly added another line to the checklist. That my personal failures are the foundation of our professional systems. It's a nice thought. It may not be entirely true, but it's nice, and I'm going to keep it.
What Customers Actually Get
When you hire Sherman Buildings, you are not hiring my truck. You are not hiring my memory. You are not hiring the man who once used a bag of deer corn as a wheel chock. You are hiring a company that has spent five decades learning how to build post-frame structures that handle Minnesota weather with quiet competence. You are hiring a process. You are hiring checklists and project managers and crew leads who know where their tools are because they have designated spots for them, which is a concept I understand intellectually but cannot seem to execute personally.
You are hiring the system that grew up around my chaos. And I think, on balance, that system is pretty good. The buildings stand up. The doors open and close. The roofs shed snow. And somewhere in Mora, there is a man in a truck full of archaeological layers, drinking coffee from a thermos he found under a tarp, genuinely impressed that his name is still on the building after all these years. Even if he can't always remember where he parked.
— Glen Blamstead: still building, still losing things, still grateful for checklists he didn't write.
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