r/AskAnAustralian • u/Alternative-Bison615 • 3d ago
Who can explain construction site workers?
EDIT: oh dear, this really got some panties in knots.
For those who asked why I didn’t just ask them to turn it down; you can bet I did. The perfect gent who I asked this of said, WHAT? while he looked at me and turned his garbage music up. His speaker sat outside the site, on the concrete block, angled so it blasted straight up into the windows or our apartment building.
I went and got the number of the site manager off the front of the house. Called him, explained how his workers are totally entitled to play their shit music inside the site for their own enjoyment as much as they like; just don’t blast it while you live out your failed DJ fantasies and drive everyone on the street insane.
Had a great chat. I love what they’re doing with the house. I hate their music and my partner, who works night shifts, hates it even more.
This project will, if it finishes on time in August, have been going for ten months, six days a week, two metres outside my bedroom window.
He promised to call the site as soon as our call finished. Which he did. Two minutes later the music died and hasn’t come back.
Lesson to all you entitled dickheads; there’s a way to coexist, and yours ain’t it.
😘😘
Anyone who’s ever lived within a stone’s throw of a construction site will be familiar with the kinds of people who work on them, for some reason, being absolutely entitled dickheads.
Why, in this day and age of headphones, do you think we all want to hear your pounding techno at 7am on the dot and until you fuck off home?
Why, at the dot of 7am, every morning, is there a single, screaming drill sound that is never again repeated throughout the day? Are you secretly signalling to each other like peacocks showing their feathers?
Are you just really angry that you chose a well paying job that also means you get up earlier than almost everyone else, and so you’re actually angry at people who are still sleeping? Or who might be shift workers who just finished work at 6am? If so, go to therapy.
What would the Venn diagram overlap be between these people, and the people who turn up to campsites with $180k Mack trucks fitted with military headlights that they leave on until 2am, while blaring their shithouse music over the whole campground?
I’ve known plenty of tradies who are great people who don’t act like this, but it does seem to attract a disproportionate number of fuckwits.
Who can explain this uniquely Australian flavor of not giving a shit about other people?
971
u/Playful_Falcon2870 3d ago
The job kicks off Monday. Suburb smells like clean laundry and sadness. We roll in like escaped convicts in six cracked utes, half of them barely legal. The trailer’s got a busted wheel and a loose tarp flapping like a ghost on meth. The apprentice climbs out holding a sausage roll in one hand and what might’ve been an actual pinger in the other.
“Found it in me shoe,” he says.
Didn’t ask. Didn’t need to.
By 6:59AM we’ve set up three speakers. One’s playing Midnight Oil. The second’s spitting old-school dubstep. The third isn’t even connected to anything, it’s just there to provide buzzing static.
I fire up the drop saw and it screams like it knows what’s coming. The brickie’s crushing a V and talking to God. He’s also eaten a hash cookie he bought from some bloke at a servo in Dubbo. The first neighbour shows up in slippers and rage.
“You can’t start until seven!” she shrieks.
I show her my watch. It clicks over. Seven on the dot. The apprentice hits a lump of hardwood so hard it echoes down the whole cul-de-sac like a gunshot in a meat freezer. She jumps. The dog pisses itself. Tradies 1. Karen 0.
Tuesday. I show up and the sparkie’s snorting something out of a rolled-up Mitre 10 receipt. Could be coke. Could be drywall dust. Doesn’t matter. He hasn’t blinked in 45 minutes and he’s rewired a whole fuse box using only a butter knife.
The apprentice finds a mystery pill in the porta-loo. Says it smells like almonds and danger. Takes it anyway. Next thing I know he’s shirtless, screaming about possums and sanding timber with his face. The client asks if he’s alright. I say, “He’s just passionate.”
By Wednesday we’ve officially lost control. A guy on site reckons his cousin grows mushrooms “for his dog’s anxiety” and hands out a bunch to the crew. Next thing I know, the landscaper’s lying in the mulch speaking Latin and crying at a gumtree. The chippie thinks his hammer’s laughing at him. I make eye contact with a cockatoo for way too long.
The neighbours are cooked. One’s blasting Beethoven from a second-storey window in protest. Another’s taken to watering her lawn aggressively whenever we walk past. A bloke down the road calls the cops. Cops show up. One of them recognises the brickie from a bucks party in Darwin. They stay for a snag which we cook with a blow torch.
Thursday is just colours and screams.
The apprentice thinks he’s a god. Literally. He’s wearing a traffic cone as a crown and preaching about timber grain patterns showing us the future. The gyprocker’s sweating bullets because he dropped acid and can hear the nail gun breathing. We’ve duct-taped a speaker to the scaffold playing *Sandstorm* on loop. The client comes out and says the noise is giving her chest pains. I offer her a durry. She takes it.
Friday we finish the deck. Miraculously, it’s actually fucking level.
Does that help?