the trivial inconvenience of jack-hammers
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I wanna tell you a story about my new apartment building. About four days after I moved in, they announced that they would be doing some large-scale work to the outside of the building. Work that involves jack-hammers and swing arms and men on scaffolds and satellite dishes being covered up and the doors and windows being locked. In short, they're tearing off all of the metal faces of the balconies on the south side of the building, 'delaminating' the concrete (knocking off the broken bits) and then resurfacing everything.
Within hours, a "tenant's uprising" was being urged in a series of photocopied pages that had been put up around the building. These urged people to phone the building's management company and give them hell.
The day after that, there were new pages up from the management about the necessity of the work, and that no amount of uprising by the tenants was going to do the job. The work began a few days after that.
Now I know what it's like to live in a building that is being hammered by several jackhammers. I'm on the north side, so I still have use of my balcony. But the noise is still incredible when they start (they claimed they'd only use the jackhammers between 09:00 and 16:00, but they fibbed, it's been starting at around 08:30).
The noise outside the apartment is far worse. And the vibrations are so strong that yesterday when locking my apartment door, I could feel the door vibrating as I locked it, and the key trembling in my hand once it was in the lock.
When I got to the stair way, which normally mutes sound quite nicely, the sound was simply unbelievable. I yelled out in surprise at the sound, and couldn't hear my own (off-color) words.
Normally I'm not too fussed about trivial inconvenience (I looked at the 3.5 month elevator outage in my building in Vancouver as an excuse to exercise) but this was unbelievable. I hustled down the stairs with my hands over my ears like some poor delicate thing.