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July 22, 2007
It was 6:15 a.m.
And I was awake. On a Saturday.
Why? You ask with a sigh in your voice.
Because they're building something across the street from me that is very complicated to put together. How do I know this? Because there have been days when workmen have roused me from bed through the clever use of not-normal morning noises, which I assume is some sort of signal that a building process is about to begin and continue throughout a fair portion of the day. And then at the end of the day I'd come home, take a look at the site, and wonder "What the hell do they do after I leave?"
It was almost as if my kids were putting the building together. They'd start very early, to make sure I was awake, and then when I left for work they'd take an 9-hour break. Now, I'm guessing that things were actually going on, no union is so strong that absolutely nothing can get done during the day, but for the non-construction savvy driving by in a minivan it looked like nothing at all was happening.
One day I remember coming home from work and seeing some PVC sticking up out of the ground; "There's something," I thought.
There were days though, honestly, when I thought the project had run out of money.
Meanwhile, about a mile and a half from me, an entire field has been turned into condos.
During the noisy mornings I normally just piled out of bed whenever I was awakened as it was typically time to get up for work; this would make it 7:15 a.m. or so. If it was a Saturday, I'd wake up, acknowledge the noise, and then go back to sleep as I can sleep through anything short of a jet engine in my ear.
Sensing this, the construction team bought a jet engine with them this morning. Actually, it was a series of jet engines they rolled in one at a time.
At one point I remembered thinking, "this will stop in a minute and I'll go back to sleep." When it didn't stop, well, it stopped while they changed out the jet and then restarted … twice … I took a look at the clock. It was 6:15 a.m.
So I called the police. I figured there had to be some sort of rule about when you could and couldn't land Harriers in a subdivision.
I apologized for being a crybaby-man to the officer who answered and explained my curiosity. Fortunately, as I was speaking, he could hear the noise from across the street through the phone. (At one point there was a high-pitched whining noise which caused the officer to pause and ask if the construction crew had acquired missile lock on me. Of course, I just made that up.)
Oh, I keep saying it was a jet, well, it was concrete truck after concrete truck that kept coming and going. How the hell could a concrete truck make this kind of noise?!
The officer told me that construction is prohibited between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. So these guys had gotten a 90-minute jump on their day. (In preparation, I'm assuming, for a big, long, lunch.)
I told the officer I was going to walk across the street and talk to the guys. He told me if I needed anything to give them a call back. I'm pretty sure that I heard him cock and lock his gun just before I hung up; it was hard to tell with all the background noise.
I brushed my teeth, threw some shorts on, and walked across the street.
The reason the concrete trucks were making so much noise is that they were pumping the concrete out of the truck and up and over the steel frame they've assembled. It would be a pretty impressive thing to watch during normal business hours or maybe on TV with Norm Abrams pointing out the subtle nuances involved in pumping concrete. (It looked like they were using a General Electric GE90 to do the pumping.)
And really, even at 6:30 a.m., with a severe case of grumpiness working, no coffee in me, and 5 hours of sleep under my belt (I was up late screwing with the iPod again), it was pretty impressive. I mean, you've got a bunch of guys, up early, on a Saturday, working. The women readers have certainly got to be able to appreciate that.
The way the pumping worked is that a concrete truck would back into the pumper and a hose would be extended to where the Sidewinders normally hang. (You know, I think Sidewinders would be a good slang term for testicles. This would allow men to work missile lock into their foreplay conversation. This would have to be a bigger turn on for women than "Let me pee first" is.)
Actually I'm not sure how the concrete truck interfaces with the pumping gizmo. I know there's a really tall boom (btw, it is now 8:45 a.m. and the noise just stopped) that goes up and over the steel frame of the building. At some point a rigid tube becomes a flexible hose. And there's a guy controlling the boom with a remote-control device hanging off his chest. The concrete comes out of the flexible tube that is moved, by hand, side-to-side where a bunch of guys with various tools spread and smooth the concrete.
I found the foreman and expressed my concerns. We chatted. We were both polite. I suggested I was most concerned with avoiding any more very-early-morning awakenings. (Had I had the power to, and I know I didn't, I wouldn't have shut down what was going on as they were just making too much progress and it would have been one hell of a mess.)
I don't have the ability to stay angry too long. And when you combine this with the fact that the foreman had good people skills and was a nice guy about the whole thing I became less upset in pretty short order (not that I have the ability to ever be rabidly angry). I finally told the foreman that if he'd let me put my initials in the concrete I'd be good with the whole thing.
I strolled back across the street and started writing this. I received a sympathy call from TDHG (people are quick to call and offer sympathy when you send mail out containing vague references to being on the phone early in the morning with the police and they have yet to read blog entries detailing their Twister parties), I went to the convenience store and bought a banana and some Diet Coke, and I sat on the back porch to enjoy the weather and the noise.
(Ah. TDHG had gotten up before I had in order to run someone to the airport, so I'm not sure I received all the sympathy I might have normally received.)
As I sat on the back porch the foreman came over and gave me coupons for a restaurant. I accepted them but told him that he really hadn't needed to do that. I put the coupons aside and we talked a bit more. I asked if he had to deal with a lot of complaints. He told me he'd had a few in his day but the most troublesome encounters were the ones in which guys showed up and wanted to fight right away. (Why would a person want to fight a bunch of construction guys? Especially guys pouring concrete. Have these people never seen an episode of The Sopranos?)
Later, in the house, I moved the coupons from the counter to the table. I had assumed the foreman had a bunch of these in his truck that he kept on-hand for grumpy men whose sleep had been interrupted. When I looked at them closer I noticed that not only weren't they coupons, (they were gift cards) but that he'd purchased them after my visit to the site.
And they were for an amount of money that sent me right into feeling-guilty mode. I felt guilty enough that I thought I might have to spend some time actually helping put the building up in order to feel better about the whole thing.
Instead — and if you've ever seen me with a hammer or a power tool you'll agree that this is a better solution for all involved — I tracked the foreman down again to thank him once more.
Posted by delmer at July 22, 2007 12:06 AM
Comments
See, now why couldn't the damn Shriner's give that sort of an apology for waking me up a 5am unloading and arranging al their go-karts in the lot across the street from my old apartment? All I got was "Well, you can come watch the parade at 11!"
Not even candy! Or a Fez! Bah!
Posted by: Chief Slacker at July 23, 2007 4:49 PM
Aren't Shriners like the Masonic Ninjas? I don't know that I'd mess with them.
Posted by: delmer at July 24, 2007 11:39 PM