A bricklayer's letter to his clients...

A bricklayer recounts in first person that he never enjoyed his job and faked enthusiasm for years while carrying bricks, sacks and concrete for clients who demanded more hours, more weight and less safety. The text describes a trade where the body is used as a machine and where complaining is punished with contempt.

A bricklayer's letter to his clients is a text circulating online that anyone who has ever hired construction work should read. Not for what it says about others, but for what it says about oneself. The author, a construction worker, confesses without anesthesia that he never wanted to do that job. Not once. That the only thing driving him was making money, and fast. Fast doesn't miccionan easy, he clarifies. It means he learned the tricks to finish as soon as possible: brick after brick, enduring the sun and the dust, and getting rid of the client as quickly as he could.

## An actor who faked enthusiasm on every job

The story describes a daily performance. The bricklayer says that for years he practiced for free the role of a man happy with his lot. While the client watched or gave orders, his mind was somewhere else. Anywhere where he didn't have to face what the job was doing to him: his wrecked back, his wrecked hands, the face of the one who pays. He says he could have won a gold medal for faking it. He faked it so much that the foreman nearly fell over laughing.

The relationship with the client is portrayed as an unequal exchange. The author argues that if the client thought he was doing him a favor by paying him for a day or a week, he was wrong. That he would have preferred the client to say "that's it" and run off. When the client fancied himself a good guy by asking what a man like him was doing in a place like that, he lost his halo as soon as he started demanding more: more weight, more hours, more dust. The bricklayer would have preferred him to shut up and let him work.

Exhaustion runs through the whole text. He was so worn out that he often had to be careful not to fall asleep while his arms kept moving on autopilot. His body burned from the cement, the sun, the chafing and the torn gloves. When blood came from a wound or his hands swelled up, it wasn't from an accidental cut. It was because his body was a machine that couldn't stop for a sprain, a scrape or a bruised finger. He bandaged himself up roughly and carried on.

## Unrealistic expectations and ignored safety

The text also points to the client's demands. When he showed up with odd ideas, cheap materials, impossible deadlines or the order to "make it look luxurious even though I'm paying second-rate prices," the bricklayer's inner machine took over. He describes disgust at those requests and at the smiles telling him he still looked young and strong enough to endure it. The client, sometimes 50, 60, 70 or more years old, watched from the shadows.

Safety appears as a limit that is crossed regularly. The author recounts that they took away his helmet, asked him to climb without a harness, carry more than was safe or work without breaks. They knew it was against the rules. The client tested his ability to say no, and enjoyed it. When the bricklayer complained enough or made clear he wouldn't take that client again if he didn't respect the rules and safety, he received insults directed at him and his trade. Condescension, threats and rudeness.

The story doesn't stop at the anecdote. The author claims that bricklayers exist because there are selfish clients who only care about their own needs and their wallet. That buying cheap, silent labor says a lot about the person doing it, about their humanity and about how they understand work. For the bricklayer, that is a sign of weakness, even if the client mistakes it for a kind of sick power and status.

## A trade that exists because of others' demand

The text's conclusion is harsh. The author argues that bricklayers only exist because men like his clients feel entitled to satisfy their needs using other people's bodies and effort. That their comfort requires access to hard labor whenever they feel like it. And that they are only there because someone stands in the way of decent, respected, well-paid work.

The text doesn't ask for compassion. It asks to be read as what it is: the confession of someone who for years did a job he hated, faking the opposite, for clients who mistook payment for the right to dispose of his body. The letter circulates without a known signature and with no more context than the story itself. There is no data on how many bricklayers might identify with it, nor surveys backing each claim. It is a personal testimony, not a study.

Anyone who has hired construction work may recognize a scene or two. The one who gives orders, the one who watches from the shadows, the one who haggles and then demands. The bricklayer in the letter doesn't say all clients are the same. He says he came across several like that. And that he learned to fake it so well that nobody noticed. That, in a trade where bodies break and safety is ignored, is the saddest part of the story.