Today Was a Boring Day

It really was.  And I mean that in the very best possible way.

When I arrived bright and early, the boring man (I know he loves being called that -- every gal in America thinks, "Hey, I had a date with that guy once....") anyway he had dug a target hole just below the telphone pole at the street.  Good thing he didn't just bore toward the pole, because that pipe in the back of his target hole is the gas main.  This utility stuff is tricky.  From the stories I've heard, every so often there is a big explosion.  Personally, I think that's why they keep coming back. Adrenaline junkies.

Soon a bucket truck from Georgia Power arrived.

And then another one came.  Umm, guys?  There are a few cars behind you.

Would you believe a third Georgia Power truck?  I promise I didn't post this party on Facebook.  They all just came.

So then the water truck for the ditch witch came up.  Maybe the Georgia Power guys didn't understand that it was just water in the those big containers.  The bucket trucks proceeded to block the driveway and park along the blind curve in the road.  That's when I remembered that I urgently needed to be somewhere else.

When I came back, I found that the boring crew had succesfully drilled from the transformer site to the target hole and pulled the orange pipe for the Comcast cable, the phone line and the main for power through the resulting hole.  Pretty exciting for boring stuff!

Now they had a target hole ready up next to the neighbor's house right under the elecrical service box. 

But if this was going to be a party, we needed some of those orange streamers!

They rolled the orange pipe wheel down the road until they had enough of it to reach the next target hole.

That's a lot of pipe!  Can you see the other guy way down the road at the other end?  Then I saw this:

Do you recognize this?

I looked at it for minute and then said, "hey that looks like those Chinese finger cuffs."  That's exactly what it is.  Only it is made out of wire.  Can't you just see some engineer type on Christmas morning watching his frantic four year old trying to release himself from the finger cuffs so he can see what else is in the stocking and thinking, "Hey, if you made one of these out of metal, you could use it to latch onto cables to pull them through holes in the ground!  All you'd need to do is attach a hook:"

And so he did. 

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Now comes the fun part.

"Cover me, boys.  I'm goin' in!"

Now here is a guy who really gets into his work.  He told me that sometimes the hole is 6 feet deep and somebody has to hold his feet.  I didn't think this would be a good time to ask if he had any phobias, like, just as an example, spiders that like to live in holes and bite people.  It just didn't seem polite.

Eventually, the job was done.  All the phone, electric and the lovely orange tube for cable tv were all hooked firmly to the drill bit.  It was time to pull it back through the hole,

which was this guy's job.  Now I don't mean to interfere, but if I were Mr. Arachnaphobia, I 'd be asking myself, "How come I'm sticking my head down in a hole, and he's sitting in an upholstered chair playing with joy sticks?"  Not that it's any of my business, but don't you wonder?  Do you think maybe they take a poll of their friends and which ever one is the most boring gets to be be the King of Boring and sit in the Boring Throne and play with the joy sticks?

Anyway, I definitley needed those little boys again.  Would you just look at the way the drilling rig squeegees the mud back off of the pipes as they come back through the hole and back into the ditch witch? That is some glorious muck.  Just the right consistency for a mud pie.  I'm gonna have to put the modeling agency on speed dial.

Finally, up through the ground with a blast of water and mud emerged the pipes and wires and cables and everything needed to put the utilities underground -- for that house -- four more to go. 

But apparently boring people don't work on Fridays.  They have three day weekends.  (Raise your hand if you want to be boring!) So, the next bit will have to wait until Monday

(pun fully intended).