Hey, Jealousy
Man, there was some shitty music in the 90's...
I've got on the train jealous for the past couple if days. It's brush pickup time in my section of Westmont, and a crew of lucky bastards get to drive around and throw all the brush people have taken to their curbs into a wood chipper.
Never pass up an opportunity to use a wood chipper if you never have.
You see, I wasn't always a telecommunications analyst. Throughout High School and college I worked for the Morton arboretum in Lisle, and the Lisle Park District. Both were outdoor manual labor jobs, and if they paid what being a telecom analyst does, I'd go back to that in a heartbeat.
The highlight of any day at the park district was getting to use the wood chipper. We had a great big commercial-grade one. You've probably all seen them, but if you haven't, it's a huge machine on a trailer with a pyramid-shaped opening at one end that you stick the branches into. From there, barrel-shaped gears pull the branch into rotating knives, and voila, from tree parts you get wood chips.
A wood chipper is just about the loudest thing you can get near, and obviously on account of what it does, is very dangerous. But let me tell you, when you're running it, that expensive piece of equipment isn't making logs into wood chips; you are.
My favorite game was seeing how large a piece of wood over the maximum 6" diameter you could force through the chipper. I'll never forget when Rich Mackins and Sammy Franzen tried to feed it a railroad tie and seized it up.
This morning, the crew was working on a felled tree in the commuter lot, chainsawing it into chipper-sized pieces. Man, I could do that all day. You'd never know it, but one thing I am truly great at is pruning a tree. I miss getting to do it regularly.
I also miss the bits. We treated ourselves (as a bit) with the same regard as police and firemen, even though we were only cutting grass and pulling weeds. That's where the phrases "Cheatin' death and Savin' lives" and "Don't worry, ma'am, I'm from Lisle" got heavy rotation. At least once a day, we'd imagine the worst thing that could happen to one of us around the heavy equipment, ponds, and tools, and then re-enact the climax scene from any episode of CHiPs:
Ponch: GIVE ME YOUR HAND!
Fat kid in school bus teetering on cliff edge: I CAN'T
Ponch: YES YOU CAN!
…And then Ponch would pull the kid to safety as the bus burst into flames while falling off the cliff.
We also would pull the truck into the parks, and then take turns dragging behind the truck like Indiana Jones.
So essentially, while we were making fun of ways you could get hurt working, we were creating new stupid ways to get hurt outside the "line of duty".
The worst injury I sustained was while trying to unload a rototiller from the back of a truck using a ramp. I was trying to back it down, and I lost control, since it weighed like 300 pounds. Anyway, I go stumbling backwards down the ramp, and behind me was this tractor-sized rake for making the ballfields nice. I got sandwiched between that and the rototiller, and one of the teeth from the "rake" dug into my backside good. For weeks, my right butt cheek looked like when your juice box mashes your PB&J in your lunch, and the jelly bleeds through the bread.
Jealous?
I've got on the train jealous for the past couple if days. It's brush pickup time in my section of Westmont, and a crew of lucky bastards get to drive around and throw all the brush people have taken to their curbs into a wood chipper.
Never pass up an opportunity to use a wood chipper if you never have.
You see, I wasn't always a telecommunications analyst. Throughout High School and college I worked for the Morton arboretum in Lisle, and the Lisle Park District. Both were outdoor manual labor jobs, and if they paid what being a telecom analyst does, I'd go back to that in a heartbeat.
The highlight of any day at the park district was getting to use the wood chipper. We had a great big commercial-grade one. You've probably all seen them, but if you haven't, it's a huge machine on a trailer with a pyramid-shaped opening at one end that you stick the branches into. From there, barrel-shaped gears pull the branch into rotating knives, and voila, from tree parts you get wood chips.
A wood chipper is just about the loudest thing you can get near, and obviously on account of what it does, is very dangerous. But let me tell you, when you're running it, that expensive piece of equipment isn't making logs into wood chips; you are.
My favorite game was seeing how large a piece of wood over the maximum 6" diameter you could force through the chipper. I'll never forget when Rich Mackins and Sammy Franzen tried to feed it a railroad tie and seized it up.
This morning, the crew was working on a felled tree in the commuter lot, chainsawing it into chipper-sized pieces. Man, I could do that all day. You'd never know it, but one thing I am truly great at is pruning a tree. I miss getting to do it regularly.
I also miss the bits. We treated ourselves (as a bit) with the same regard as police and firemen, even though we were only cutting grass and pulling weeds. That's where the phrases "Cheatin' death and Savin' lives" and "Don't worry, ma'am, I'm from Lisle" got heavy rotation. At least once a day, we'd imagine the worst thing that could happen to one of us around the heavy equipment, ponds, and tools, and then re-enact the climax scene from any episode of CHiPs:
Ponch: GIVE ME YOUR HAND!
Fat kid in school bus teetering on cliff edge: I CAN'T
Ponch: YES YOU CAN!
…And then Ponch would pull the kid to safety as the bus burst into flames while falling off the cliff.
We also would pull the truck into the parks, and then take turns dragging behind the truck like Indiana Jones.
So essentially, while we were making fun of ways you could get hurt working, we were creating new stupid ways to get hurt outside the "line of duty".
The worst injury I sustained was while trying to unload a rototiller from the back of a truck using a ramp. I was trying to back it down, and I lost control, since it weighed like 300 pounds. Anyway, I go stumbling backwards down the ramp, and behind me was this tractor-sized rake for making the ballfields nice. I got sandwiched between that and the rototiller, and one of the teeth from the "rake" dug into my backside good. For weeks, my right butt cheek looked like when your juice box mashes your PB&J in your lunch, and the jelly bleeds through the bread.
Jealous?
posted by Zach at 10:27 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home