I did, for about fifteen minutes this afternoon. It was awesome. From the third floor of a building looming right over the site I could see pretty much everything going on beneath. There were surprisingly few people actually at work, and only four that I could see actually doing anything: one digging a hole with a backhoe, one digging a hole with a shove, one picking up a dumpster with a crane and banging it against some kind of portable generator for a while, and one carefully examining individual rocks from a pile of gravel. I’m not entirely clear on what the last two were trying to achieve but I’m sure it was very important. Anyway, I got to wondering:
- How the hell do they erect cranes? Seriously?
- How does that whole thing with the counterweighting concrete blocks on cranes work? When there is no load on the lifting arm of the crane, why isn’t the whole thing weighted precipitously towards the cement end? Is there some kind of careful balance in which the mass of the cement blocks splits the difference between that of an unloaded lifting arm and the maximum bearable load, so that the most load that can be on any arm at any given time is half the maximum?
- Why do crane operators only display their own company names on the top of cranes? Why not sell the valuable advertising space? Those things can be visible for kilometers and always draw the eye. If the people who contracted the construction company have a problem with it, they could always be cut in for a share.
The world is full of mysteries.
