Have you seen the film “Saving Private Ryan?”

There is a scene where Tom Hanks and his infantry cohorts by the side of the road are digging through a stack of hundreds, if not thousands, of WWII dogtags … to determine if Private Ryan is already among the dead. The group realizes they are looking at the names of dead soldiers — lightheartedly — as a few survivors of the battle straggle on by. They realize how insensitive this is for the survivors who have lost friends and brothers in battle.

So they stop.

Today, I felt sort of like that … more than insensitive … dirty.

Dirty, dirty, dirty.

In eight months of Dirty Gigs to supplement this blog … I have waded all night, ankle deep in sewage; nearly melted on artificial turf in the Texas sun; seen my own blood ooze out of my work gloves; battled refrigerators full of rotted food; driven through a blizzard on a closed highway in North Dakota; cleaned a morgue, and I have seen an elevator shaft filled with human waste after a flood.
Gross! But none of that was really upsetting. This morning I was upset … by my own actions.

This morning I rushed to the jobsite, with a heaping plate of food, fresh from the free breakfast buffet at my hotel. There wasn’t time to eat at the hotel, so I brought it with me.

Once the morning tasks were underway, and the safety meeting was completed … I instructed my labor crew to begin cleaning contents from a building … while I sat down nearby to a plate of hot sausages, steaming scrambled eggs, a muffin, a banana, a pint of milk and a deliciously hot coffee.

Oh my gosh. I promise you every eye in the place watched as my fork moved from the plate to my mouth. Big sad eyes. One by one, the workers all filed by to stare at my plate at close range and to catch the aroma firsthand.

“Gotta any more of that?” “Is that sausage?” “Ooh those eggs smell good.”

Dang … I felt terrible.

Some of these laborers jump from one part-time project to the next with the labor management agency … and do pretty well financially. Some are not so lucky and struggle to make ends meet, as jobs pop up sporadically for them.

Some of these folks came to work today — like me — without first eating breakfast. But, for them, it was not a matter of hitting the snooze alarm one time too many.

They are good workers. They want to work. They have children to feed, first … They are hungry.

My bad … I felt dirty.