Sleep for oil

I'm so glad my holiday starts tomorrow. A couple of more days and I'd be blowing things up. Not just fuses, bigger things. Like diggers. Also good, that I only have a few nights left in this room before I move out, as the construction site has now really overstayed its welcome and expended all my patience.

The building is almost finished, they are mainly doing work indoors. But as they dug a deep hole for the building, they are now landscaping the surroundings. With a crawler digger that was last oiled before it left the factory in the 1980's. Imagine a dry, rusty bicycle chain and the noise it makes. Then multiply it by a million. Add screeches like someone were running their nails over a blackboard. You get my 8 am daily wake-up call.

Seriously, noise pollution is serious and if sustained, it can flip you. I don't want to refer to yesterday's events in Berlin even though that's sort of a case in point as well, but living beside a building site has been a nightmare. I have been tolerant, thinking that they need to do these things to get the building up, but there are a couple of things I just don't understand. Why do you have to start the day with maximum use of power tools and noisy equipment? I know they think they are already making concessions by postponing the start of work until 8.00, but surely you could phase things in terms of noise a bit better. The racket they make from 8 to 9 is just unbearable. At around 9.30 things get better, because they start their coffee breaks. I swear, these guys take more and longer coffee breaks than even grad students do. And after the first coffee, things get more quiet. I guess they just need to wake themselves up with some chainsawing or pneumatic drilling before they can get to building things.

Also, it's the unnecessary noise I hate. Like this digger, for instance. It's not the first digger here, the place was crawling with them when they started digging the hole for the building. But they were never that loud, because they were properly maintained. And the whole thing is exacerbated by the debile look on the driver's face when he is crawling that digger around. I must be honest, he doesn't look like the sharpest tool in the toolbox. Or someone who would care to maintain equipment, if he's capable of doing it at all.

First I was thinking of going and bringing the guy a can of oil so he could de-noise his digger. Now I'm thinking more along the lines of delivering the oil, nah, gasoline in the form of a Molotov cocktail.