This morning was not a good time to work in our office. No, no, we didn't have ravaging executives screaming at cowering underlings or anything like that. Nor did we have tense, silent, ominous awkwardness. No, we had something worse.
We had air hammers.
The building is being refurbished, sort of. Construction guys (or contractor guys or someone) have been putting a new "face" on the building. And today was the day that they were attaching some of the new facing. With the air hammers.
So our office sounded like the inside of a steel and concrete tree being attacked by gigantic woodpeckers.
Every so often it would stop for a few minutes and then start back up. I assume that this was while they reloaded the hammers. It turns out that it takes about as much time to reload the hammers as it takes for me to untense, which was probably humorous to watch if one could turn the sound down.
I told Ira that everytime they had to reload, I felt like I was in an episode of M*A*S*H - you know, one of those ones with lots of shelling:
"Listen!"
".....What? I don't hear anything."
"Yeah. It stopped."
One of our staffers (at least one, rather) went home with a headache around 10:30. They stopped for the day - or because some poor office worker pushed them off of their scaffold - around 11:45 or so.
But the temperature was okay at least.
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2 comments:
You have my profound sympathy. They were rehabbing a section of our building last summer; the worst was the 2 or 3 days they spent drilling through raised-floor tiles that musta been solid metal, given how much time they spent drilling them. >shudder<
As I said, my deepest sympathy.
As someone who is on the other side of this problem I can tell you that when I bid a job I exclude working after hours and weekends. The landlord and General Contractors could do this work then but choose not to most likely to keep costs down. The other reason is that in a great deal of communities noise ordinances have been enacted that prohibit this type of work at night and on weekends. In Alexandria I have to insure that my employees do make too much noise when arriving at a site and we cannot perform any type of work after 12:00 on Saturdays without a special permit, which are hardly ever issued, and not at all on Sundays. Committees have enacted these noise ordinances without truly thinking through to what the consequences will truly be. So in your case it may be that they had to work during your work hours.
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