Day 127: 2.5 million dollar project (2)

My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts

Day 127: 2.5 million dollar project (2)

There was a time when I woke up to the sound of silence, or birdsong, depending on the time of day. When I wake up at 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. I hear nothing at all, but when waking up around 6:00 a.m. (which doesn’t happen very often) I get greeted by a cacophony of birds all competing with each other with tweets, chirps, and songs.

Nowadays I wake up to a different loudness. With the parking project in full swing, the construction workers create their own kind of noise. A jackhammer, a type of mini bulldozer and two other machines all fight with one another over who can create the biggest racket.

Then there are the men. Most of the time they go about their job in ‘silence’ but every now and then they need to communicate with each other which is not as easy as you might think. When Marcel is having fun with the jackhammer, Renee has to shout and whistle quite a few times to get his attention.

When they talk to each other, they don’t really talk as such, they shout. Understandable as one man is on one side of the parking lot and the other is on the other side. So, communication goes in the form of yells, screams, and hollers.

How the men manage to work in this heat is beyond me. Yesterday's temperature was 28 deg C (82.4 deg F) but they don’t seem to be bothered. Dressed in jeans, T-shirts and a helmet, they sit in the tiny cabins of their machinery and tirelessly scoop up the soil and deposited it in the container. Judging by the mountain of soil it’s going to take them days if not weeks to get through it.

Someone asked me the other day if I was a construction worker, which job I would prefer. Would I want to be a builder, a glazer, or did I have something else in mind? I didn’t have to think long. If I was to be in construction, I would want to be a crane man, okay to be correct a crane woman. I quite fancy the idea of sitting high and dry in my own little cabin, several meters above the ground. There’s a problem though … I have a fear of heights.

Anyway, back to ‘my’ construction workers. Around 12:00 the noise usually stops when the workers kill their machinery for lunchtime. They eat, they have a cup of coffee or tea, followed by a well-deserved rest. From the looks of it, the one on the left is contemplating life, the middle one is busy with some stretch exercises, while the one of the right is conked out. For his sake, let’s hope there are no birds in those trees.

I can’t wait to see what they get up to in week three.

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