When contractors get hired for a job, they have a lot of tasks that need to be completed.
What would you do if you were a concrete pourer, and the contractors did not complete the cleanup process that they are required to do?
That is what happens in this story, so the concrete guy finds a way to clean it himself, while leaving a big problem for the contractors.
Check it out.
If you are a contractor, you already know, but sometimes contractors can be a bit rude about washouts.
And as bad as the ones who get all proprietary about their washouts can be, the absolute worst are the ones who don’t bother to provide any washout, not even a wheelbarrow.
I never knew about any of this.
When that happens, the driver has three options.
The first is to just washout on the ground and hope they don’t get caught.
This is a sub-optimal solution as the fines for washout water reaching a storm drain can be $10,000; if it goes into a federal watercourse, it can hit $25,000 (and this whole valley is a checkerboard of BLM and reservation land).
You really only see this happen when the driver can wash out into an empty form (like an un-poured sidewalk) or rubble pile.
The second option is to scrape down the chutes as best you can, then make a mad dash for the plant where you can hopefully wash the concrete off the drum’s fins.
If the plant is too far away, the concrete will get too hard and make a complete mess of the drum.
Drums can be chipped out, but we try to do that as infrequently as possible (i.e. once you have so much buildup that you can’t hold ten yards without spilling) because that means turning the chippers loose on your drum.
This sounds like a lot of work.
Chipping a truck means crawling into a cramped, hot, damp, steel echo chamber, and firing up a jackhammer.
Chippers do this every night.
Chippers are more jaded than Liu Sheng’s burial suit.
Chippers never bother to say something when they punch a hole in the side of a drum, rather leaving it to the driver to discover the following morning (hopefully before a bunch of concrete goes into said drum).
We do not scrape down unless we are near a plant and have no other option.
The third option is the bucket.
Most drivers have at least one five-gallon bucket somewhere on their truck.
If they have one that is not currently filled with the caustic witch’s brew used to clean their truck, a driver can stick that bucket at the bottom of their chute, wash down a bit, carry the bucket up the ladder, dump the contents into the hopper, and repeat. Imagine climbing a ten-foot ladder while carrying a good-sized medicine ball…about six or eight times.
It takes forever, is backbreaking and miserable work, and sometimes there is just no other choice.
Unless you are Bob.
Before Bob became our wonderful manager, he was a lowly mixer driver.
Bob was a driver for a very long time, and he started before they began putting automatic transmissions in mixers.
Between working the clutch and climbing in and out of his truck, Bob has completely voided the warranty on his left knee; the man totters around like a semi-corpulent Long John Silver (this is not an uncommon injury in the industry).
So, Bob is patching the v-gutter at a storage unit.
I would be upset about this.
When they finish the job, they’ve left his chutes packed with concrete, and they have no washout.
They don’t even have a wheel barrow.
Bob has nowhere to scrape all that concrete out of his chutes, let alone wash down.
When he asks the foreman what to do, the guy just shrugs and says, figure something out.
Bob is less than pleased.
It’s considered bad etiquette to leave a driver’s chutes packed like that; a good chute man will stop the pour a little short, then do a basic scrape down to fill the rest.
They are in the middle of the city, on an asphalt drive, so he can’t just wash down uncontained.
It’s the middle of summer, and too far to get back to the plant, so he can’t make a run for it.
And anyone who thinks Bob is about to hobble up that ladder with a bucket full of concrete several times (before he even gets to the point of washing down into said bucket) is tripping like a drunken tanuki.
Bob does not get his Homer bucket.
Instead, Bob goes back to his cab and pulls out a big wad of pink plastic.
The air tanks on our trucks have petcocks on the bottom to drain water (water can precipitate out of compressed air as it cools, slowly filling the tanks with an incompressible fluid).
We don’t really need them, since we work in a desert, but they give a ready supply of air at 120 psi.
He slips a rubber valve over the end of the petcock, opens up the tank and Boom!
Bob has created his own washout, and it is absolutely fabulous.
It turns out that every fall, as the various stores began dumping their summer inventory, Bob wanders around town and picks up a few kiddie pools on some extreme discount.
This is genius.
Just to make his point, he always goes for the brightest colors and most garish patterns (occasionally he would even find a bootleg MLP knockoff or something sparkly).
When Bob has to make a washout, he makes the most awesomely eye-watering washout he can.
So Bob washes down into this pink crime against the visual arts, making sure to fill it all the way (if he had to pay good money for it, was sure he was going to use it), and he leaves.
He just folds up the chutes and gets out of there, leaving the kiddie pool sitting on the asphalt.
Providing a washout is, ultimately, the contractor’s responsibility (and, if they didn’t order the job as a scrape down, their requirement).
So is disposing of the washout.
One of the reasons wheelbarrows are so popular for emergency washouts is because they are so easy to clean up. After all, the whole thing is readily mobile, and, once nobody is looking, it can be wheeled over to any patch of dirt or lawn and just flipped over (sadly, I see this happen often).
That isn’t the case here.
This does sound funny.
Watching someone try to move a full, inflatable pool without spilling is an instant cure for melancholy.
They are not rigid, and just about anything you do is going to dump muddy water everywhere (which then has to be cleaned up).
The only real solution is to leave it sitting there, in plain sight, until enough water evaporates that it can be moved without making a mess (and in this case, there was still at least 100 pounds of concrete to deal with).
Now that he’s manager, Bob makes sure we all have hideously pink wads of plastic shoved behind our seat.
Now that sounds like a funny, but messy, situation for the contractors to deal with.
Let’s take a look at what the people in the comments have to say.
Bob is the real hero here.
This commenter loves the pink pool!
This person works for a builder.
Here is an Australian saying their trucks are different.
This person wants to buy Bob a drink.
Bob is a genius.
We all love it.
If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.
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Twitter (X), Inc. was an American social media company based in San Francisco, California, which operated and was named for its flagship social media network prior to its rebrand as X. In addition to Twitter, the company previously operated the Vine short video app and Periscope livestreaming service
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