The other day, my coworker complained that nothing is simple. It sent me in search if a career that is simple.
I thought of my brother in law, who used to drive a logging truck and operate an excavator until he was injured. Most people think driving a truck is fairly simple; truck drivers are often looked down upon as unskilled labour.
But driving truck isn't simple, and neither is operating an excavator. The men and women doing it only make it look that way.
Let's start with driving a truck. It sounds simple at first: move this cargo from point A to point B. Except that the cargo weighs fifty tons. And it's spread over two trailers. Your route takes you down a hill, through a city center, and up another hill. In the winter. When you get where you're going, you have to reverse those two trailers into position so they can be unloaded.
Not so simple anymore. I don't know that many people who can tow a trailer forward very well. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who can reverse a single trailer well. When that trailer weighs more than the tow vehicle, the number gets even smaller.
Speaking of that disparity in weight, since you're hauling the weight of a fully-loaded 737 down the road, most of the axles on your truck and trailer have brakes. Which is fine at first, until you think about slippery road conditions and corners. How do all those brakes work together? I have a heavy (1700kg) trailer at home, and I don't want to haul it around in the winter. Why? Because I don't know what I would do if I were rounding a corner on the highway and the trailer suddenly decided it wanted to be in the ditch. Steering into the skid doesn't work as well when you have a four thousand pound anchor pulling sideways on your rear end. Now, think of the truck, that has seven axles instead of two, and two points of articulation.
The more I think about it, the more I marvel that as many trucks make it to their destination as they do.
Then there's the excavator. Just recently, over thanksgiving weekend, I had the opportunity to watch the same brother-in-law dig a well using a mini-excavator (a CAT 303.5E, to be precise). Now, the well is deeper than the arm of the excavator can reach, so he built himself a series of benches - steps - so he could get the machine within reach of the water. The downside of this is that instead of moving the dirt once - from the hole into a pile, he had to move the dirt several times, repositioning the machine each time, so that he could move the dirt out of the way.
Watching this happen, I couldn't believe that the man-machine interface was something as clumsy as a collection of levers and buttons. The movements of the machine were as coordinated as my own arm if I were digging the hole with my bare hands; something I couldn't fully appreciate until I jumped into another machine - a small wheeled loader - in order to move some dirt out of the way.
At one point, he was moving the excavator to a new position, and the machine, deep in the trench, slipped a track. My first though was, "we're screwed." But my brother-in-law, he sends me to fetch a couple prybars. Between those and the winch on the quad, we were able to get the track nearly back into place. And that's when the side of the trench gave way.
Fortunately, it wasn't a complete cave-in. But enough sand sloughed in to bury the track we were trying to wrestle into place. Thoughts of large cranes are going through my head as we head off to the neighbour's to borrow a tow rope.
As I'm rounding up some random bits of chain, my brother-in-law uses the loader to build a shelf that will get the loader close enough to the disabled excavator while keeping it on a firm footing. Then we attach the rope between the two machines. I started the pull on the rope with the loader, which didn't do much.
Until the excavator, using one good track and its only good arm, started crawling out of the pit. I had the image in my head of a wounded soldier crawling out of a trench. The arm would push against the side of the trench, lifting the disabled track off the ground. Then the other track would crawl forward, until the arm reached its limit, and the process would repeat.
Once the machine was on level ground, we attacked the track again with prybars and a small winch. Within ten minutes we had the track back in place and the machine was ready to work again.
That's what years of experience gives does: it takes you from, "All is lost," to "well, shoot, this is gonna set me back a couple hours."
Turns out my coworker was right: nothing is simple.
Watching this happen, I couldn't believe that the man-machine interface was something as clumsy as a collection of levers and buttons. The movements of the machine were as coordinated as my own arm if I were digging the hole with my bare hands; something I couldn't fully appreciate until I jumped into another machine - a small wheeled loader - in order to move some dirt out of the way.
At one point, he was moving the excavator to a new position, and the machine, deep in the trench, slipped a track. My first though was, "we're screwed." But my brother-in-law, he sends me to fetch a couple prybars. Between those and the winch on the quad, we were able to get the track nearly back into place. And that's when the side of the trench gave way.
Fortunately, it wasn't a complete cave-in. But enough sand sloughed in to bury the track we were trying to wrestle into place. Thoughts of large cranes are going through my head as we head off to the neighbour's to borrow a tow rope.
As I'm rounding up some random bits of chain, my brother-in-law uses the loader to build a shelf that will get the loader close enough to the disabled excavator while keeping it on a firm footing. Then we attach the rope between the two machines. I started the pull on the rope with the loader, which didn't do much.
Until the excavator, using one good track and its only good arm, started crawling out of the pit. I had the image in my head of a wounded soldier crawling out of a trench. The arm would push against the side of the trench, lifting the disabled track off the ground. Then the other track would crawl forward, until the arm reached its limit, and the process would repeat.
Once the machine was on level ground, we attacked the track again with prybars and a small winch. Within ten minutes we had the track back in place and the machine was ready to work again.
That's what years of experience gives does: it takes you from, "All is lost," to "well, shoot, this is gonna set me back a couple hours."
Turns out my coworker was right: nothing is simple.
