Left Out
I’ve always been the odd one out. In pre-school, I was always the first to lose at musical chairs. In elementary school classes, I was always the one who either had to work by himself or join another group as the third wheel because nobody wanted to be my partner, and in sports, I was always the odd man out because nobody picked me for their team. It was the same in high school; I tried out for the basketball team, but I could only make it as equipment manager, and when everybody formed their cliques and lunch tables, I was the weird kid everybody either made fun of or felt sorry for that sat alone.
I always held out hope that it was just the way things are when you are a kid and that things change when you get out there in the real world, but it hasn’t turned out that way so far.
I was never all that smart, so instead of a four-year university, I go to community college and work a construction job to pay the bills. In a lot of ways, the guys I work with are super masculine like you’d expect from a construction worker, but at the same time, they are just like a bunch of high schoolers. I admit I’m not the biggest guy out there or the best worker, but I work hard. Instead of appreciating that, though, they all just band together to make me feel inferior and left out.
For example, we got this new piece of machinery last week, an EZ Screen portable screening machine to replace our old gravel screening machine, and everybody took turns driving it around, but when I tried to hop in and have a go, one of the guys stepped in front of me and told me I should just skip it because I wouldn’t be able to handle it, and everybody laughed.
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