congruentepitheton:

Small town culture is knowing that there are Old Folks with strange nicknames but never knowing the stories behind them.

Of course, I made the mistake of asking why everyone calls this one guy Brickaday and it turns out that he worked at a brickyard for 40 years, stealing exactly one brick every day and making no particular efforts to conceal the theft. Nobody thought anything of it until years later he was discovered to have built three houses.

His boss is said to have shrugged and made some remarks about the importance of coming up with a plan and sticking to it.

I‘m trying to arrange my face into an appropriate approximation of silent bafflement and failing miserably.

Assuming he worked a five-day week and didn’t take a lot of vacation time, 5x52x40 is 10,400 bricks — probably slightly fewer if we take national holidays into account.

Asked how many bricks go into an average-sized house, someone on Quora calculated 8,176 standard-size bricks per 1,200-square-foot storey. I don’t think Brickaday could have built more than one house, unless these were larger-than-usual bricks or small houses.