A while back I accepted a contract in the City of Chicago for a marketing company. Yes, they were developing some cross platform software for a client. I paid an insane amount of money for a corporate housing unit a little over a block away from the client. What made the insane amount of money seem sane was the fact that most of the other places in the area wanted _twice_ as much and their units weren’t new. Okay, I’ll give them a plug, Pinnacle Furnished Suites. Matt was a great guy to deal with, the unit was great and the view spectacular.
Of course the down side is that I did little more than sleep in the unit. Yes, it was another one of those 7 day per week type contracts. If I was in town I was either passed out in the unit or at the client site. When I finally did have a day off I went home to gather my mail.
What really bummed me out about the work schedule wasn’t the hours but seeing this site out my window each morning and sometimes in the evening. You see, many years ago when The History Channel actually had programming worth watching, they had a Modern Marvels segment about cranes. It was interesting to watch the center lift, or whatever they were called, cranes hoist up a new section, set it into place, then continue walking up the side of the scaffold.
Admittedly I didn’t have the highest resolution camera when I took that picture, but, zoom in as much as you can. This crane doesn’t walk up the outside. It appears to have a pedestal or base sitting flush on the top of the scaffold and a massive counterweight hanging off the back. I really really really wanted to be sitting in that apartment unit watching, maybe even filming somehow that crane getting sections added or removed.
I’m sure there are many people around the world who know exactly how this particular crane style gets new sections of scaffold, but, I don’t. No, my life won’t be significantly better off if I do know, it is just that it was there, every day, and became one of those perpetual little nagging questions in the back of my mind. Yes, I could research on the Internet and “maybe” find the same style of crane an a video clip, but that isn’t the same as sitting in your living room _watching_ it happen.
