All about me!

It’s been an extremelydifficult year for me. Problems stemming from illegal immigrants undercutting me. Problems stemming from extreme weather I’m not accustomed to here in Massachusetts. Problems based on underperfomance and repair costs on my equipment. Also, problems stemming from my recent diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

For most, you dont know me and dont understand that maybe I have too little respect for medical science to have accepted this infliction. However, maybe some can remember how I complained about the heat like never before.

Fibromyalgia is an infliction which for me stemmed from something common for people with rheumatoid arthristis which is genetic and runs through my family. It is a disease that is incurable, but the symptoms can be recuced with an extreme diet regime of vegetables, fish, and basically a macro-biotic diet. I’m not opposed to this, but completing this diet involves bringing my whole family into my situation and changing their lifestyles.

Imagine yourself as a roofer that was always physically strong and seemingly indestructible and all of a sudden you wake up and you just cant do what you could but your bills say you have to. What would you do? I’ve completed the other stages of fibromyalgia, which is to enter depression and anxiety.

I’ve voted no medication. I’m going to deal with this as a man and hope I’m strong enough to deal with this. I can not become addicted to anything even if it means my life, as far as this issue is concerned. But what do I do?

Fibromyalgia is basically a disease in my educated opinion in which the arthritic pain your body experiences during the night keeps your mind occupied and you never enter the final stage of recuparitave sleep. The result is that it doesnt matter if I sleep an hour or twelve hours, it’s the same mental result. I feel like an 80 year old man. What the hell should I do? The obvious decision to me is that according to my infliction I can’t carry my partners weight which is killing me, but I can’t leave him high and dry because he’s my best friend… so what do I do?

I don’t want my life to fall apart or my partners and I’ve given too much to my dreams to let them die. Please, anyone with any experience in this help me! I’m begging from one hard working man to another.

Jeez, sorry to hear. I feel for you. Sometime in our lives we all have to make these “new” decisions about our working lives.

Can you pull out of the field and just do the office work?

Sales?

Setting up and takinig down the jobs?

I don’t know how big your company is or how old you are, I might have a bunch more ideas?!.

ps, theres nothing wrong with taking the medical or medicine way to help you relieve some pain and discomfort!!!

Sorry to here. I have not gone thru anything like that but there must be something in your company you can do rather than killing yourself. Sales is a great way to contribute and not work as hard. Hell your the one that starts the ball rolling. If you need some help with that i will be willing to lend a hand. Email me and give me your phone number and we can help. Hope you feel better also.

Thanks for the replies and sympathies. Sales seems like the obvious way to go, but the problem with sales is that me doing the roof and writing the contracts has always been my niche and my “sales pitch” lets say. I usually don’t even carry ANY employees, it seems every person I hire at all different skill levels and pay scales all come with some kind of baggage or bad habits that I don’t like dealing with. Whether it be wondering if the guy with the best abilities is going to show up on time or if he cheats to make himself look faster and better,or if he’s a new guy that says he has all this experience and how great he is and then he only gets a square ripped and shingled in a day and still wants top dollar that was promised, or a young kid laboring that gives me a heart attack every day at how awkward he looks just climbing a ladder. I’m probably too soft for employees, it seems like the screamers get it done with them and make money. I just look for one day and end up firing all of them. I don’t like to scream.

I’m considering clustering a whole bunch of unskilled workers all within eyesight of me and just supervising, i.e. just organizing the flow of work, laying out chalklines, monitoring safety, and basically making roofing dummy proof for a crew of like 15 guys paid at laborers wages. Anyone thats been in business for a while ever try it like this? Did quality go down, or were you able to monitor that many dummys pretty well and catch mistakes before they happen? Did you get screwed from downtime for, lets say, supplier forgot the pipeboot? These kinds of guys come and go, how much time did you spend trying to replace them and didn’t it start getting expensive on advertisement? Also, how do you decide who are the keepers and who to get rid of in crews like this? They will ALL look like they don’t know what theyre doing to me which brings me back to just firing them all.

S&G, I think that would be a fine way to go. Before I went out on my own, I was a commercial roofer. I was a foreman for one of the biggest roofing companies around. Thats exactly how I ran my crew. It worked just fine, I could see all the work being done, I could make sure there was no down time, I could make sure nobody was wasting any time and I got the most out of my workers. I would pretty much stand around and bark orders all day long, helping the guys that needed help, teach the guys that needed teaching and was always right there with the guys watching over them at all times.

Not a bad idea.

Fibromyalgia is basically a disease in my educated opinion in which the arthritic pain your body experiences during the night keeps your mind occupied and you never enter the final stage of recuparitave sleep. The result is that it doesnt matter if I sleep an hour or twelve hours, it’s the same mental result. I feel like an 80 year old man. What the hell should I do? The obvious decision to me is that according to my infliction I can’t carry my partners weight which is killing me, but I can’t leave him high and dry because he’s my best friend… so what do I do?

is this self dionogise? cause I can relate

this is not a self diagnosis. when I said “in my educated opinion” what I should have said is “from my researched understanding.” I was given a prescription and everything that I will NEVER take. I don’t know how it is in other peoples necks of the woods, but in my neck, all these drug addicts have prescriptions and I won’t let that happen to me. If my life is going to hell it will at least be honestly. I live in a rough town where valedictorians become valium addicted… really theyre all into those oxycontin and vicadan and heroin, i was just using a pun but you get my point. For someone that is already genetically predisposed to it, roofing puts enough stress on the body to cause the trigger it to go off, and sales puts enough stress on the brain to trigger it to go off… so, maybe you should get checked…

That probably would be a good idea sev.

like you i rarely take anything pain ! we need to rest and relax more often :slight_smile: