Whatever the weather is where you are at - hot/cold/wet/dry… - who have you encountered doing a job you would HATE to be doing (due to the weather, NOT simply because you would hate the job!)?
Right now in my Chicago area burb accuweather lists the temp as 93F. In the sun, it feels hotter. Workers have been up on the roof of the house behind me all day, removing an old roof and installing new shingles. YIKES!
What have you seen?
My son repairs air conditioners. Every time I’m outdoors for more than two minutes, I think, “I couldn’t survive one hour of that.”
Just walked the dog around the block. MAN - it felt hotter than I had thought. 2 doors down from the roofing job, a house is having the aluminum siding on the 2d story painted. Seriously? I can’t IMAGINE the heat that would be radiating off that metal, and that such conditions would contribute to good paint adherence/curing.
Roofer was my first thought on seeing the thread title.
Yesterday, I saw a guy loading a pest control van and looked like he’d just finished a job. He was wearing a beekeepers’ hood. I’d think that trying to exterminate wasps in a sweltering attic or shed would really suck.
Roofing is right up there with road repair and asphalt paving as jobs that are a bitch in any weather, but brutal in hot weather.
Had a lineman check out one of the circuits on the Centrex line feeding one of our retail stores. When he finished up, he was telling me what he found and repaired and mentioned that he also removed a couple of active wasp nests inside of the circuit box mounted on the utility pole.
The thought of being on the arm of a bucket truck and flipping open the cover of that box and being met with stinging insects made me visibly twinge. I’m not even allergic to those things, but the thought of being up in the air like that with no easy way down — ugh…
I live in an older neighborhood where the mail carrier still has to walk from house to house (as the mailboxes are attached to the houses rather than by the street). It might not be the worst job, but with the wildfire smoke in the air this past week it’s still not a job I’d want to have. At least the heat wave seems to be over.
Last summer I had to have an exterminator up in my attic. It must have been over 100°F up there, poor guy.
It’s almost a hunnert… not sure if that’s Fahrenheit or Humidity. I sure wouldn’t want to be working with the census today, trying to get a long interview keyed into an iPhone while baking in the direct sun …
… oh, oops, bad timing.
…
ETA: Don’t worry, cooler tomorrow… during the lightning storms.
I framed houses for a while. It really sucks in the winter. Had to shovel snow out of the unfinished/un dried in house before you could start working. And we weren’t using air nailers back in the day, so you couldn’t really where gloves when building walls. Too hard to finger nails.
I tend not to be terribly sympathetic to the challenges pro athletes face, but today I’m tempted to include pro golfer in this thread.
They are playing today S of Chicago. Temps have been in the 90s all week. There are only 60 or so players in the field, so there isn’t a problem with scheduling enough tee times. There are no fans, so getting fans to the course is not an issue. Right now, at 1 p.m., no golfer has completed more than 6 holes, and golfers are scheduled to tee off as late as 1:30! Hell, they could televise it whenever they want.
Sure, the roofers and all are working a lot harder than a pro golfer for a lot less $, but why in the world wouldn’t the PGA Tour let the players go off starting at - say - 8 a.m.? I feel for the caddies, lugging those heavy bags in the heat of the day from 1-5 p.m. Last week, one caddie had to drop out due to a leg cramp or something.
I guess if they want a hard, fast course with demanding conditions to test the golfers, they’ve got it!
A friend of mine drives a spotter truck at a railroad intermodal terminal. It’s like a baby semi tractor – once a shipping container is taken off a train car, and placed on a trailer for trucking to its final destination, the spotter truck is used to bring the container and trailer to a ramp, where it’s mated with an over-the-road semi for transport.
She tells me that her spotter truck has a fiberglass body, and no air conditioning, and other than her lunch break, she’s in it for her entire 12-hour shift. On a day like today, she gets home, takes a cold shower, drinks a bunch of water to rehydrate, and falls into bed.
Isn’t she allowed to have a water supply in the cab?
She is, but when she’s sweating that much, in that “fiberglass terrarium,” she feels like she’s running a deficit when she gets done with work.
For heat, i suggest a cooling ranger hat, they have a band you soak in water, keeps the head cool. Similar thing in a neckerchief.
Also Emergen Hydration, tastes like Tang, gives you electrolytes . (Gatorade isnt all that good for electrolytes).
Back in the day when farmers baled hay in 40# bales, someone had to stack it in the haymow. 120+, dusty, no ventilation, dim lighting, unstable surface, collapsing edges to fall 20-30 feet. The good old days. Typically the kids and the neighborhood non-farm kids did it. The boys would be shirtless trying to convince the girls to do likewise. Very rarely ever happened. Just one rumored success would guarantee plenty of volunteers for that farm for the next 5 years, even if it never occurred.
Years ago I had a neighbor who was a roofer. Winters he worked regular hours but summers, when I was leaving for work at 6am I’d wave to him just getting home.
The heat pump quit last week and it was a week-long process to figure it had to be replaced and do so. We sweated it out for two nights but by the third, the house was not dropping below 95 at night so we fled for a motel. The crew arrived Thursday morning and left by noon but even so, I gave the three of them $20 each.
I sure wouldn’t want to be any of the CDF crew currently fighting the 400 acre brush fire about 2 miles east of here. It’s 107° outside and that area is rough and steep.
