The other day, while painting some cabinets on an upscale kitchen job, I banged my elbow hard enough to bring on an immediate case of bursitis. I burst forth with a string of curses, only to look up and see a Ring camera perched on a bookcase pointing right at me. The blue light was on: recording. My outburst would’ve made profane leftist podcaster Jennifer Welch take notice.
It was captured for posterity. And for my customers’ enjoyable later viewing, when there’s nothing good on television. I suffer from an anachronistic lack of instinctual awareness when it comes to the pervasive intrusions of technology. I need to remember that I’m filmed pretty much every time I leave the house.
Gradually, over the last decade, I have become more aware of home-and-business-equipped cameras, but old habits, like speaking freely on the job, remain. Last summer I was laying masking paper across an aggregate walkway when I painfully knelt on a loose piece of concrete. Pretty sure I said “motherfucker.” When I looked up, a waist-high Ring camera affixed to the front door frame was staring me down. My customers were nice respectable senior citizens, pillars of the community. I know these people.
They think they know me: educated, attentive to customer service, a conscientious hard worker. It’s painful again to imagine them re-racking the Ring footage of my day on the job, only to be disappointed or amused by my offhand bitching and obscenities. I can hear the answer when friends and neighbors ask about how the new paint job went. “Well, the work was fine, but we reviewed some of the Ring footage to check the prep work, and wow, we were shocked by some of the language used by Mark Ellis.”
I started my painting contractor business in 1978; if there was nobody home, you were alone. I could bitch to co-workers with impunity about taxes. I could share anecdotes about my wife, girlfriends, crewmembers who’d called in sick, even offer a tradesperson’s analysis of the customers who were providing the income that put food on the table. I’ve railed bitterly on the job about the Democratic Party while spackling holes and listening to Sean Hannity, all the while being recorded by my staunch Democrat clients. Recorded saying something like “Those bastards on the Supreme Court just overturned Trump’s tariffs,” can do serious damage to the old referral stream.
There must be hours of me swearing, ball-busting, smirking maliciously about things like Eric Swalwell’s Chi-Com lover, even breaking into tears over a failed topcoat. God forbid anyone I’ve worked for should start sending my diatribes around on social media, or worse, posting them on YouTube. I don’t even want to contemplate the embarrassment I’d face from the people in my orbit, my friends, family, customers, girlfriend, and the guys and gals down at Sherwin Williams.