Jack the Hammer

Fought the good fight, and won. The battle if not the war. We came home an hour ago to the sound of jackhammers ringing up and down our street. It was 10pm. I rang the police. They said, they can do nothing, I would have to ring the Council. So I got on my ugg boots and walked down to the guys who were carving up the roadside with their gigantic hammer-carrots.

There were two of them, young and decent. Two older guys who work for a different company – the ones who take charge of blocking off the road – sort of shrugged when I spoke to them first, nothing we can do. I went and tapped Jack the Hammer on the shoulder. “Hi!” I said over his mate’s continued noise. “Do you realise this is a residential area? And it’s 10 o’clock at night?”

He pulled his earplugs out to speak to me. After a while his mate stopped work and we all chatted. I said, when my brother was doing that work, he used to wake up with his hands locked in a gripping position. Yeah, he said, feelingly. I said, you know in some practices like yoga, they suggest you do the exercise that’s the opposite, so that you undo some of the damage. Like if you hunch over a desk all day, you can lie back over a ball, to stretch it out. You could maybe stretch your hands this way… He tried it. “So that you don’t feel like you’re 75 when you’re only 28,” he said.

The other guy was calling his boss. He came back. “Boss says he’s sorry. It’s actually not in his control. You would have to ring the utilities company.” I said, “Can you please give me their number?” He wrote it down on a pink post-it note for me. He said, most probably it’s the local businesses who wanted the water to not be shut off while they’re trading. He said, You should have got a notice through the letterbox, a noise notice. He said, Usually we do this work during the day.

I went back home and called the utilities number. The guy at the other end was unhelpful and bullshitty. His smooth corporate speak annoyed me. “Yes, there’s nothing I can do,” he said several times. He tried to tell me the guys on the road would have “just said whatever to get rid of you, not meaning to be rude.” He slid the responsibility smoothly equidistant from all parties like a bead floating on an abacus so there was no sum. I kept him on the line for quite a while before giving it up. Then I heard the truck pull up stakes and park outside our door.

I told them what the call-in guy had said. “He said we should just wait til business hours and then report it.” “Hah! How does that help you?” Jack the Hammer rang his boss again, then his bigger boss. He came back to our door and stood shyly, courteously on the path, until I noticed him and came back out to ask what gave. He showed me on his iPad all the hydrants up and down the streets of Brisbane that need work done. I said, Is that all the places where you have the pleasure of jackhammering in future? He said, “He shouldn’t have said we would tell you anything and that we were just bullshitting you.” I said, “I know! I thought that was rude. He was just trying to avoid taking responsibility.” He rang his boss again. “Yeah we’re hammering in the middle of all these houses, mate. This needs to be done during the day.” He so impressed me. Courteous, friendly, warm, pragmatic, and with humour. Stood up to his boss and to his boss’s boss. No soft soap, just genuine humanness. I felt like offering them a cup of tea. My eyes felt like they were peeling. He said, “I’ve got my big boss to come out here… he’ll be about a half an hour.” I said, “Well, if he needs to talk to me, can you get him to come knock? I’m going to try and get half an hour’s sleep.” He said, kindly, “Would you prefer he rang your mobile number? That way he doesn’t have to disturb you and that.” I said, “Yeah, that’d… No, wait. I reckon it’ll be harder for him to tell me, to my face, that you’re about to start jackhammering at 2 o’clock in the morning.” “True,” he said. We shook hands with great affection. I told him, “You did a good thing. You’re very very decent and I appreciate it. Thank you.” He said, “Well, you need your sleep.” And then they went away.