Starting at 9:03 this morning, there was a jackhammer doin' its thang right outside my building. It's Saturday morning. On Saturdays construction work apparently isn't supposed to start until 9 AM as far as city ordinances are concerned; on weekdays it can start at 7.
Both times are far too early for the sleep schedule I have, but here's the real rub—because the construction crews want to get started at 7 or 9 right on the dot, they do their "prep work" starting at 6:15, 6:30, 6:45, or, as was the case today, 7:30. Yep, an hour and a half of prep time for the jackhammer that sounds like it's inside my apartment right now.
Plus, construction workers do not care how loud they are at 6:15, 6:30, 6:45, or 7:30. They yell things like "HEY MAN, YOU'RE ALMOST LATE!!!!" to their coworkers. Well, if your coworker is almost late but isn't actually late, is there any need to discuss it? By the way, it's now exactly 7 AM, so please feel free to make other pointless statements at an even higher volume.
Currently all of the windows in my building are being replaced. There are something like 180 apartments here. The job started back in March of last year, then stopped after one month when the contractors realized they'd ordered the wrong kind of windows.
The job started back up in March or April of this year, and now the windows on my side of the building are ready to be replaced. The window team should be on the fifth floor in a week or two, and before they arrive I have to move all the furniture in my living room and bedroom four feet away from the windows. I don't have a lot of extra space in either room, so I assume I'm going to be moving a lot of stuff into the kitchen, which is too small for, say, my chest of drawers. Dragging my bed four feet away from the window isn't going to be easy, either.
I pray for rain in the forecast these days, because if it's going to rain, the window team doesn't show up for work. It's overcast this morning, but I guess the jackhammer team only fears hail. There used to be a lot of jackhammering in the fall of '04 and winter of '05 when the parking garage behind my building was having two floors added to it. This project kept going and going, starting each morning at 7, and when the garage was finally finished in March of '05, that's when we got notice that the windows would be replaced. Thank God those contractors ordered the wrong kind of windows, thereby delaying the project and giving us silence for a year. Well, semi-silence—my moron neighbor for my first three years in this building picked up the construction workers' slack.
The constant construction on my block (not just limited to my building) may be the thing I hate most about living in a big city; it's going to make me scurry back to the south more than anything else. And if you're wondering why I still live in this building or on this block or in this neighborhood, well ... umm ... you know what, I'm going to talk about something a little cheerier tomorrow, like how you can help me make prank calls to my old neighbor at 4 AM. I feel a headache coming on right now.
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