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Jan. 18th, 2005 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tyggerjaiAnd I must say, I'm enjoying working with the rednecks. I've had to start saying "cunt" a little more, and "fuck" a lot more, and both of them together quite a bit (apparently, in the real world, two short whistles (raise hook) is more commonly expressed as "Carn, ya fucker, get the fuckin' thing up there." But I digress.), but ... there's no angst, and no politics, and no bullshit. And remarkably little ego. I'm sure *that* changes onsite too, but most blessedly of all the PP&R process is remarkably concise, and simple. "Well, you fucked that up." And that's if, y'know, you somehow failed to notice your load cannoning into the side of other things on the way up or down. There's no bug reports, no customer-mandated SLAs, no optimising, no waking up in the middle of the night to scribble down a better lifting algorithm. You lift heavy things. It's a lot like the gym - instant feedback on binaries. Lifting *safely* is a little more complex, but not much, in a TAFE prac yard. Rigging gets more complex, but dogging, certainly, is not a vocation that rewards the intellectual. My biggest problem is that I'll over analyse a lift - the rednecks just sling it & hoist it. I'm constantly struggling to keep up - I'm getting distracted by optimal sling configuration, when I should be centering my hook and just fucking slinging it. Because optimal sling configuration doesn't matter - the law of diminishing returns kicks in as soon as you come up with *a* safe and effective sling configuration. There is no "better" - there's no sling configuration that will save you the time it takes to think of it, and there's absolutely no reward for a "technically better" or "elegant" sling. None at all. You just get an annoyed crane driver, who won't work with you again.
And one thing I have have an appreciation for is a good crane driver. In fact, with a good crane driver, the dogger seems to become essentially superfluous, on simple loads. Our crane driver can drop a hook dead centre for a load (and even allow for boom flex) with absolutely no help, and once we've hooked the load, he really only lets us direct because, well, that's what we're there to learn :) He could certainly drop them in place better than we can, at the moment. We're there in case the load moves out of his sight, as far as I can see, and to take the fall if he drops it on someone :)
Though we've had a couple of ... interesting lifts - pipes that look like sections of the classic windows screensaver. When you have to sling that so that all the pipes in the relevant plane are parallel to the ground, and all the others are perfectly vertical, that's where I started to claw back some ground. And onsite, there *will* be a pipe fitter waiting with a spirit level, and they *will* bitch if it doesn't line up perfectly, and you can't blame the crane driver for the sling balance.
And being able to work out the volume of a cylinder in my head, and memorise density charts (Rock =~ 2T/m cu., up to 2.6 for really, solid rock. Which has, incidentally, a pressure bearing rating of ~ 40 T/m sq. Concrete weighs in at ~2.4 T/m3, but more like 3 if it's reo. Steel is 8. Hardwood, from memory, gets up to 1, but wood, especially soft wood, adds 50% again if it's wet.) is a bonus. But again, it's all book learning - I just have a shortcut or two.
So yeah, in all, fun, and fun precisely because I don't have to think, and today, when I nailed the hook dead centre for a bundle of concrete poles (well, ok, I had to move the dunnage back a few inches when I put it down, but I blame load shifting), it just felt good. I haven't felt so uncomplicatedly proud of a piece of software *ever*.
sol.
.
And one thing I have have an appreciation for is a good crane driver. In fact, with a good crane driver, the dogger seems to become essentially superfluous, on simple loads. Our crane driver can drop a hook dead centre for a load (and even allow for boom flex) with absolutely no help, and once we've hooked the load, he really only lets us direct because, well, that's what we're there to learn :) He could certainly drop them in place better than we can, at the moment. We're there in case the load moves out of his sight, as far as I can see, and to take the fall if he drops it on someone :)
Though we've had a couple of ... interesting lifts - pipes that look like sections of the classic windows screensaver. When you have to sling that so that all the pipes in the relevant plane are parallel to the ground, and all the others are perfectly vertical, that's where I started to claw back some ground. And onsite, there *will* be a pipe fitter waiting with a spirit level, and they *will* bitch if it doesn't line up perfectly, and you can't blame the crane driver for the sling balance.
And being able to work out the volume of a cylinder in my head, and memorise density charts (Rock =~ 2T/m cu., up to 2.6 for really, solid rock. Which has, incidentally, a pressure bearing rating of ~ 40 T/m sq. Concrete weighs in at ~2.4 T/m3, but more like 3 if it's reo. Steel is 8. Hardwood, from memory, gets up to 1, but wood, especially soft wood, adds 50% again if it's wet.) is a bonus. But again, it's all book learning - I just have a shortcut or two.
So yeah, in all, fun, and fun precisely because I don't have to think, and today, when I nailed the hook dead centre for a bundle of concrete poles (well, ok, I had to move the dunnage back a few inches when I put it down, but I blame load shifting), it just felt good. I haven't felt so uncomplicatedly proud of a piece of software *ever*.
sol.
.