Misty diesel-scented memories
This morning on the way in to work, I passed a street crew repainting the arrows and "ONLY"s in the turn lanes.
Ahhh, memories.
I used to do that. I've mentioned this before, but for two summers when I was in college, I worked for the Street Department as a seasonal employee. We did all sorts of jobs that first summer. My second summer I'd gotten my commercial driver's license, enabling me to drive a dumptruck, so I spent most of the time hauling that year, but the first summer, it was a lot of different jobs.
First, there was the asphalt shoveling. City crews don't do any paving, at least they didn't in Janesville. Actual paving was contracted out to paving companies. We did small jobs, patch-ups, like when the water department had to dig up a chunk of street to get to a pipe, or when the sides of the road had to get dug up to put in new curb. We'd patch it. And of course...potholes. That was the worst asphalt-related job. The nice thing about the asphalt jobs was that we had built-in half-hour breaks whenever we had to go get a fresh load of blacktop at the plant, which was about ten miles south of town. On a busy day our three-person crew would shovel twenty or so tons of asphalt. You'd think that'd be the worst job, but it wasn't. I didn't mind doing asphalt.
Then, there was the line painting. I worked with the guy who drove the machine that painted the lines down the center of the road. It was my job to put cones down on the freshly-painted lines, and then pick up up the cones when it was dry. You'd think that'd be the worst job, but it wasn't. It was all done from the back of a trailer on the machine, so it wasn't too bad at all.
And then there was the mowing. I got a big vote of confidence about halfway through the summer when they trained me on the sickle-bar mower, a tractor with a long bar jutting from the side with moving blades in it that the city used to mow medians, and overpasses, and empty lots the city was responsible for. You'd think that'd be the worst job, but it wasn't. I actually really liked mowing with that thing, even though they broke down about three times daily and you had to become an on-the-fly mechanic.
Oh, and the crosswalks. Painting crosswalks was like some kind of logic puzzle, because you couldn't paint the whole thing at once. Cars had to be able to get through still. So you'd split it up into quarters. You'd do the outer two quarters on all four crosswalks, and by the time you had the fourth one done, the first one would be dry, so you'd pick up the cones and then do the inner two quarters. On side streets without much traffic we used a little cart with a downward-pointing spray gun to paint, but on busy streets we'd use the flame painter. It used a powdered paint and a gas jet that melted the powder and applied it to the street, where it would dry instantly, so you could do the whole crosswalk at once and not use cones.
I didn't mind doing crosswalks, but I HATED it when it was my turn to flag traffic. We'd switch off painting and flagging, and I hated flagging. I hated it because whenever I told people that I worked for the Street Department, they'd always say, "Oh, are you a flag girl?" Oooh, that used to piss me off. No, I am not a flag girl, I do the same work all the big burly men do thankyouverymuch. So it irked me when I actually had to be a flag girl.
None of these jobs were the worst jobs, not even our rainy-day job of cleaning out storm sewers, which was wet and hard and made you horribly sore.
The worst job was painting arrows and ONLYs. HATE. It was the worst because unlike most of the other jobs, there was never any shade. Those turn lanes are right in the middle of the damn street, and it's July and it's ninety-eight degrees and the pavement gets really hot and bakes you from below. The arrows and ONLYs are painted with stencils, and the stencils are really awkward to move around, and as the day goes on they get really heavy from accumulated paint. At the end of the day you had to scrape them clean. You couldn't use the painting cart thing like for crosswalks, you had to take the paint sprayer OFF the cart and do it manually like you were spray-painting a house, but downward, and it killed your back.
Yeah. That was the worst job, hands down, at least for me. Plus I had a grudge against the spray-painting machine because one day when I was cleaning it, a hose blew and covered me in traffic safety paint. That stuff is NASTY. It isn't like house paint, it's chlorinated rubber, and the only solvent that you can use for paint thinner is toluene. So I had to basically scrub my arms and face and neck with toluene to get the paint off me.
Ah, memories.
Ahhh, memories.
I used to do that. I've mentioned this before, but for two summers when I was in college, I worked for the Street Department as a seasonal employee. We did all sorts of jobs that first summer. My second summer I'd gotten my commercial driver's license, enabling me to drive a dumptruck, so I spent most of the time hauling that year, but the first summer, it was a lot of different jobs.
First, there was the asphalt shoveling. City crews don't do any paving, at least they didn't in Janesville. Actual paving was contracted out to paving companies. We did small jobs, patch-ups, like when the water department had to dig up a chunk of street to get to a pipe, or when the sides of the road had to get dug up to put in new curb. We'd patch it. And of course...potholes. That was the worst asphalt-related job. The nice thing about the asphalt jobs was that we had built-in half-hour breaks whenever we had to go get a fresh load of blacktop at the plant, which was about ten miles south of town. On a busy day our three-person crew would shovel twenty or so tons of asphalt. You'd think that'd be the worst job, but it wasn't. I didn't mind doing asphalt.
Then, there was the line painting. I worked with the guy who drove the machine that painted the lines down the center of the road. It was my job to put cones down on the freshly-painted lines, and then pick up up the cones when it was dry. You'd think that'd be the worst job, but it wasn't. It was all done from the back of a trailer on the machine, so it wasn't too bad at all.
And then there was the mowing. I got a big vote of confidence about halfway through the summer when they trained me on the sickle-bar mower, a tractor with a long bar jutting from the side with moving blades in it that the city used to mow medians, and overpasses, and empty lots the city was responsible for. You'd think that'd be the worst job, but it wasn't. I actually really liked mowing with that thing, even though they broke down about three times daily and you had to become an on-the-fly mechanic.
Oh, and the crosswalks. Painting crosswalks was like some kind of logic puzzle, because you couldn't paint the whole thing at once. Cars had to be able to get through still. So you'd split it up into quarters. You'd do the outer two quarters on all four crosswalks, and by the time you had the fourth one done, the first one would be dry, so you'd pick up the cones and then do the inner two quarters. On side streets without much traffic we used a little cart with a downward-pointing spray gun to paint, but on busy streets we'd use the flame painter. It used a powdered paint and a gas jet that melted the powder and applied it to the street, where it would dry instantly, so you could do the whole crosswalk at once and not use cones.
I didn't mind doing crosswalks, but I HATED it when it was my turn to flag traffic. We'd switch off painting and flagging, and I hated flagging. I hated it because whenever I told people that I worked for the Street Department, they'd always say, "Oh, are you a flag girl?" Oooh, that used to piss me off. No, I am not a flag girl, I do the same work all the big burly men do thankyouverymuch. So it irked me when I actually had to be a flag girl.
None of these jobs were the worst jobs, not even our rainy-day job of cleaning out storm sewers, which was wet and hard and made you horribly sore.
The worst job was painting arrows and ONLYs. HATE. It was the worst because unlike most of the other jobs, there was never any shade. Those turn lanes are right in the middle of the damn street, and it's July and it's ninety-eight degrees and the pavement gets really hot and bakes you from below. The arrows and ONLYs are painted with stencils, and the stencils are really awkward to move around, and as the day goes on they get really heavy from accumulated paint. At the end of the day you had to scrape them clean. You couldn't use the painting cart thing like for crosswalks, you had to take the paint sprayer OFF the cart and do it manually like you were spray-painting a house, but downward, and it killed your back.
Yeah. That was the worst job, hands down, at least for me. Plus I had a grudge against the spray-painting machine because one day when I was cleaning it, a hose blew and covered me in traffic safety paint. That stuff is NASTY. It isn't like house paint, it's chlorinated rubber, and the only solvent that you can use for paint thinner is toluene. So I had to basically scrub my arms and face and neck with toluene to get the paint off me.
Ah, memories.