One of the hazards moving into a new and incomplete development is the never-ending building operations around you.
Workers screaming expletives at each other and grunting trucks coming and going, loading and off-loading sand, bricks and planks and adding to the cacophony.
Then there’s the dust settling on windows and in every nook and cranny, up your nostrils and into your ear-holes. Gale force winds rake up empty Coke bottles and take-away containers, soiled paper napkins, half eaten pizzas and slap chips, whipping them over your fence.
Reading or listening to the radio is nigh impossible, making for a grumpy old man.
Chatted up one of the builders on site about the noise factor, especially the rowdy workers.
His answer gets blood pressure rising further.
If they stop talking they stop working.
It comes with the territory and nature of the beast.
Ha-ha. So the more they talk, the quicker the job gets done, and out of your hair, old man.
With emphasis on “old man”, insult deliberate.
After a week of this, another noise appears. Stamping machines.
The builder corrects me after my complaint. They’re compactors.
Without them the ground will give way and the house will soon come down like a ton of bricks.
Ha-ha. I feel like tapping his head with a para brick.
The compacting goes through your cranium for two days. Two Grandpas every two hours don’t work.
Thankfully this operation comes to an end, and there can’t be anything worse in the offing.
Wrong.
Paving is next, requiring a bulldozer to clear out the rubble and level the ground.
It’s bad enough having to listen to the sounds of scraping and digging, but there’s what the builder calls “reverse warning”.
Whenever the bulldozer is put into reverse gear, a high-pitched peep-peep-peep-peep emanates from a siren mounted at the back.
The sound sends me up the wall. My wife catches me throwing rocks at our garden sculptures and yanking out her onion shoots.
She brings me a ice-cold frosty and suggests I make an appointment with a shrink.
Or perhaps, she says, I get religious. My left eye pops.
Just another four months, old man, and we’re outta here, shouts the builder over the fence, as a grinder is wheeled in for cutting a thousand bricks.
My right eye pops.
