Laborers

Laborers

One should never be too old or too set in one’s ways so as not to be open to learning and improving oneself. When I wrote my story yesterday and mentioned that I would be hiring a pair of Mexican laborers, a term I view as only descriptive and not in any way derogatory. Being half Venezuelan and often being mistaken by marketers as having a Hispanic surname, it would be hard for me to have any objections to Hispanic Americans. That is especially so since I am extremely pro-immigration for both humanitarian as well as economic growth reasons. But nonetheless, my son Thomas suggested that I drop the Mexican descriptor and just call them laborers. I am not sure that they would find it more limiting to be call Mexican than they might feel to be pigeonholed as laborers, but I understood what he was saying to me and I adjusted my story by dropping the reference that these day-laborers were Mexican.

Today, Handy Brad went and picked up two such gentlemen at the Escondido Home Depot and brought them to help with our installation of the new basalt column water fountain. A note of importance for this task is that Handy Brad, despite living here in Escondido for over twenty-five years, does not speak a word of Spanish. The basic requirement (in addition to being able to understand Handy Brad’s elementary directions), was that they had to be strong enough to help muscle this 1,400 pound stone upright where it is intended to go. We expected to do all the thinking and directing as we had been discussing this pondless fountain project for several months. I even went so far as to send a text to Handy Brad early this morning with an eight-step plan of action that started with picking up laborers and ended with turning on the fountain. When Handy Brad arrived at the house, I could see that he had chosen well. There as a big beefy guy and a young slender one. Both were fit and strong. The older one was named Polo as in North Pole and the younger Gustavo. Polo is 45 and Gustavo is 21. Polo has been in the United States for fifteen years, having lived in Indiana, Chicago and New York before landing in Escondido. Gustavo has just come into the country. Both are from Oaxaca and I suspect that both might be illegal. Polo speaks a bit of English and Gustavo speaks none.

I liked both guys, but Polo was very special. It only took me an hour or two to ask him for his telephone number since I can easily see using him for any number of future projects. What made Polo so special to me was two things; first he had a can-do attitude, which I always value and I find especially helpful with the cockamamie ideas I tend to come up with. The second and most valuable attribute that Polo possessed was that he had lots and lots of experience in what I would call project problem-solving. He had a solid grasp of mechanics and physics, which are quite valuable when you are trying to hoist a 1,400 pound rock upright fifty feet from where it currently rests on its side. He impressed me immediately by suggesting (2/3 relying on my Spanish and 1/3 relying on his English) that our huge one-ton gantry and hoist were overkill for the job and that this could have been done by hand. That might have been no more than a bold claim except he picked up a ten-foot two-by-four and set it on edge under one end of the stone column and levered it up a foot like it was nothing. I had been pretty sure that tilting the column up would be much easier than lifting the full load.

I have found the physics equation needed for this little trick. First of all, this type of lever is called a Class 2 lever and if the two-by-four was placed two feet under the column, lifting it would take a mere 280 pounds of lifting energy. I think I intuitively knew that the force required to lift a tilting object was much less than a deadlift, but this fulcrum math is more startling than I expected. It sure shocked the hell out of Handy Brad to be sure. That is the type of awareness that does not come intuitively to someone like Polo, but rather comes as a result of lots of heavy lift experience.

I spent six years working on the New York Wheel project and while I learned a lot about project management and heavy lift operations (we worked with the number one heavy lift company in the world, the Dutch company Mammoet). While I hate that the project never got completed despite successfully financing it twice with abundant sources, I learned a lot about the difference between physics theory and physical reality. After working with the best heavy lift company and structural engineers in the world, one Danish engineer put it very plainly to me; We were pushing the limits of physics and material science with our project. No amount of theorizing makes up for experience. The best people I worked with at Mammoet were not necessarily the engineers, but the on-site crane foremen who knew the practical limits of what the metal and the physics could do, no matter what the equations indicated.

Polo was my job foreman and he guided us through all the rough spots while Gustavo, despite being a much smaller guy than Polo and barely knowing him, did exactly what Polo told him to do. I respect both of them immensely for the way they approached their task. There was one point where an idea of Polo’s to place the winch against a tree and use a pulley to improve the angle of winch attack ended with the stone column pivoting around 90 degrees and falling into the hole it was intended to stand up in. The maneuver even made a few tears in the rubber liner, something we were trying hard to avoid. The best news is that we all were attentive enough to stay out of the way of the shifting monster as it fell. Without missing a beat and with no castigation, I immediately said, OK, now let’s put the winch up on the gantry directly overhead. We did that and the wind lifted the column straight up and allowed us to position it perfectly. In retrospect, I’m not sure we could have done it as well if we hadn’t made the mistake that we did.

I take pride in persistence and risk-taking and muscling through tough situations. And I have great respect for these kind of laborers that carry on and do what is needed in the face of uncertainty, failure and threat of angering the boss. My admiration for Polo and Gustavo, my day laborers (NOT my Mexican day laborers) is great. As soon as the column was in place, they waisted no time in dismantling the winch and gantry and cleaning up the site. These guys work hard. It should make any American proud to know that guys like these, simple laborers, want nothing more than the chance to work in America and maybe one day join us as American citizens.