A normal day

Just a normal day at work.


You never know what you end up doing. Driving whole day. Trying to get a big crane 500 k`s further to do a crane lift. A mobile crane wich maximum speed is 70 k`s a hour. I was the one driving the car a few hundred meters in front to warn other cars that there is a wide vehicle approaching.


Roads in the outback are pretty narrow and dangerous, with just two lanes. And with a crane as wide as a one and a half lane, it can cause some problems for other drivers. So my task was to drive in the middle and to push other drivers from the road. I felt like in the movies , playing those chicken games with cars. It`s fun with other cars, but if one of those road trains are approaching, you feel a bit nervous. But i managed with a few heated moments. Happily, there are only one a hour that i had to drive a car from the road.


And you can imagine, a drive of 8 hours at 50 up hill and 70 down hill, It can be pretty boring. And especially if you forget your i-pod with 4000 carefully selected songs. So i probably have seen every bush every tree and every wildlife that there was to see that day. Just thinking , that i had to do it again, driving the crane truck back. Another day seeing the exciting bush on the way back. The same tree, the same bush and the same wildlife with no i-pod. Just lucky that it wasn`t my job.


But all by all, it`s a pretty good job. I earned some priveliges at the company. Beeing on a
bush team has some advantages. It`s almost that you are the elite of the company. But i reckon i`m the only one that sees it that way. We got a workshop of our own, just for three people. Got our freedom to go when we pleased if we are in town. The possibility to say fuck off to the safety officer. So all by all, they just leave us to do our job. No work floor manager that inspects your work to see if you made something like he wants it to.
And if i`m in town, the work can be interesting. making and installing dance pools, fabricating fire bins.


And sadly , this week a college died on the road. Coming from a bush trip , working long days and couldn`t wait to see his love ones in adelaide. Couldn`t wait to have a sleep , but drove straight away another 1500 k`s . And yes, nobody will know, felt a sleep, hit a kangoroo, lost control of vehicle, he never arrived at his love ones. A few days later they found him , somewhere in the bush at the lonely stuart highway. One moment full of dreams and the other moment no more dreams.


So let`s make those dreams real before they are gone.