A while back, I was working up on a ladder painting a background on an old pole sign. The sign was only about 4x8 in size, and was lit at night by incandescent lights in bowl shaped fixtures extending from a piece of electrical conduit sticking out from the top of the sign. I had just about painted one side of the sign, and for some reason happened to look over my shoulder.

To my horror, instead of seeing a light bulb behind my head, there was a wasp nest the size of a large grapefruit, covered with dark red wasps, all of them watching me. One false move I might have made while painting that sign would have brought me under intense attack. I eased down that ladder and declared war on them from a safer distance.

Recently, Chris and I were taking down a sign on a 12' pole that had been badly damaged when clipped by the box bed of a freight truck. The all metal sign, built kind of like a lighted sign but with metal faces and no lights, was all bent up, and one face was missing. I stood on a ladder removing bolts that screwed up into the bottom of the sign, as Chris positioned himself to lift the lightweight sign with our bucket truck.

Suddenly Chris cried, "You better watch out, there's a black widow spider in the bottom of that sign not far from your hand there." And he was right. We managed to kill that one before the sign was lifted from its mount, but once we had it on the ground we found another black widow, plus quite a few more reasons for a case of arachnophobia, a considerable population of brown recluses. We quit counting them somewhere past a dozen. For a while there we were smashing and stomping spiders right and left, intent on not carrying any live ones back to the shop.

I guess a Texas signman working outdoors never knows when he might come under attack by some critter or another. But the most common, and perhaps the most frustrating attack we contend with in our sign business, is the one I've had to deal with a lot lately. I call it the attack of the piddley-diddleys. That is an overwhelming charge of little, time consuming, low paying jobs that you can't seem to avoid, and sometimes come at us en masse.

That's what's happened to me recently at the shop, and I am just now getting things under control. Not 'till after the battle though. These piddley little jobs started to gang up on me just before I took a week of vacation, and when I got back it seemed like the crew had taken mostly those types of jobs for me to deal with upon my arrival back at the shop. So the battle was on.

What types of jobs am I talking about? Well, like putting some lettering and decals on a volunteer fireman's helmet, some pretty small stuff which then had to be put on reflective material cut in an arch. What do you charge a volunteer fireman to spend an hour's time on his hat? Or for those little complex three-color decals my church buddy needed for his daughter's softball team, as far as that goes? Or having to drive 55 miles round trip to change two words on a sign we had recently done for a small town church because the preacher left and a new one took his place?

Obviously we would charge for these and the many more little time consuming tasks which had to be completed, but when you add it all up, the dollar amounts won't make for much of a shop rate, I'm sure. Some are favors; some are even donations, and all of that is okay I guess. Except when there's a surge of them at one time, a wave of junk to do battle with, an attack of the piddley-diddleys.

I could be wrong, but I think that if this was the type of work we did all the time, as Roy Clark once said, I'd be so broke if they were selling steamboats for a dime apiece, all I'd be able to do is run up and down the bank exclaiming, "Ain't that cheap!?"

Well, at least I'm on the downhill side of things now. Perhaps I can go back to concentrating on work that really will make the shop a little money. Yes, that would be nice. But, from years and years of being in this business I know that sometime soon there will be another wave, another battle with an onslaught of small stuff to contend with. It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.

But, thank goodness, we don't do it everyday.

'Til next month,
--Rick