Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Welcome to the Rock

Nashville is built on rock. Solid rock.  Nowhere is this more evident than downtown, where the buildings crowd up against the river. Even the outlaying areas must be mindful of this fact, which is why you see very few in ground pools.  It takes a lot of effort and not a few sticks of explosive to get rid of the rock.

This last week, the building in which I toil for the man has begun construction of additional space for parking. Underground parking. Are you ahead of me on this?  This means that they must first dig out the aforementioned rock.  The parking lot beside the building has become ground zero for this activity, centered around two giant pieces of equipment.  The first is pictured above, a large claw machine (no quarters accepted!)

Second, here you can see the real culprits which have now affected my day.  (Effected?  Affected?... gotta call Bruthah Bubba on the Grammer-Phone! - Bubba says "Effected."  We can continue, now.) Anyway, these are two very large jackhammers.  I'm sure they probably have their own name, or code word or nickname or some other way of referring to them that makes good ol' boys squeal like a 12 yr old girl at a Justin Beiber concert.

It started as they tore down the old loading dock. Noise. Vibration. And the two in combination, you can only imagine! Remember back in high school there was always a couple of kids who thought they were drummers and would pound rapidly (and loudly) on their desk in a very misguided attempt at the drum solo in The Surfari's "Wipe Out."* Staring off into space, mouth a grim, tight line of determination.  Conversations came to an abrupt end as you could hear or feel nothing but a giant muddled rumble in the study hall floor as the unevenly balanced desks transferred this mad, loud (and bad) frenetic pounding into the floor and across the room. That's what this is like, only 100 times worse. It's like the School of Amateur Drummers has set up auditions outside my office and they are all doing the same drum solo but they each started at a different time.

The result can be felt throughout the entire building and then some. The really hard part is that there is no place I can go, no way to get a respite from it all.  It's not like I can take the next 18 months off.  (Yeah, Boss, I'm going to be needing a few paid days off....about 550 days to be exact. Am I sick?  Ok, let's go with that.)

18 months.  My nerves are already like mush....and they haven't even started blasting yet.

=====================================

If, for some unknown reason (read: you're too young) you haven't heard the Surfari's "Wipe Out" you can hear it by clicking here;

No comments:

Post a Comment