Construction

A little story about construction here.

There's a ton of construction going on here. Typical construction is concrete frame, brick infil, plaster on brick. Nothing special, easy to overdesign, hard to screw up too bad. So there's this 7-story apartment building going upabout 3 blocks from our place. They poured concreted and they were cleaning out the mixer on the street (of course, no reason to have a prep area), concrete slurry can be seen trailing 3 blocks away. There's two guys at the mixer cleaning it out, and they're dumping the excess concrete out into the street - maybe 3 to 4 yards of concrete lying there in the street. There's another guy shoveling this waste concrete into a wheelbarrow. There's a fourth guy at the wheelbarrow waiting for the shoveler to finish (there's only onewheelbarrow). The guy with the wheelbarrow then wheels the concrete around the corner about 50 feet to where the construction dumpster is located (also on the street). He dumps the concrete on to the street, in a pile. There's another guy waiting there with a shovel where he will shovel that concrete into the dumpster.

That's fives guys, two shovels, dumping the concrete into the street twice. It really took me back to the good old days in Aruba where we figured out how to improve efficiency by 70% by giving the drywall guys nail aprons instead ofhaving one guy hand each drywall screw to the otherguy actually installing the board.