April 26, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:I love the big construction
I love the big construction machines. They put me in mind of dinosaurs.
In the early days it was the grapples, crawling over the pile to pick up fistfuls of steel in their enormous claws and deposit it on the trucks, like a prehistoric monster uprooting a tree and waving it around for effect.
Then there were the cranes, just towering over everything, graceful, elegant, enormous.
Now there are the cherry pickers, which are funny because the driver steers from the basket, suspended in the air behind the machine as it lumbers forward. And the excavators, clawing out enormous piles of dirt from the ground as they prepare it for new construction. The front loaders, carrying loads hither and thither. And any number of smaller machines, forklifts and bobcats and such. Like little baby dinosaurs, they manage to be cute even though they're a LOT bigger than I am. (And even though their operators would kill me if they heard me refer to them as "cute").
This site has to be one of the largest assemblages of working construction machines ever in this country -- like a mechanical Jurassic Park. And though now that it is hollowed out it looks, in scale, much as the pyramids must have done, down to the little city we've built for the workers (though ours is made of tents and trailers rather than mud huts, and we have (mostly) indoor plumbing). But the difference is that Pharoah had to use overseers with whips to grind his monument out of the muscles of the workers, killing many of them in the process. So far this job hasn't had a single fatality that I know of, an the men are paid upwards of $25 an hour, plus benefits, to do labor that's a lot easier, and less dangerous, than their peasant forbears. The raw muscle power that took all those lives has been replaced with machines that turn a day's labor into a minute's work, by one man comfortably ensconced in the cab of his mighty machine.
Ain't technology grand?
Posted by Jane Galt at April 26, 2002 6:31 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links