What is it with gardeners ?
I live in a block of units. Each Thursday morning, the body corporate has a guy come around and vacuum the carpets in the hallways and also clean the footpaths and driveway. For the outside areas he uses one of those blower-vacs, which has to be one of the most annoying sounding devices (probably second only to a stone cutter – but how often do you hear them in suburbia ?).
He generally starts sometime after 8am on a Thursday morning, which is not an unreasonable time to start I suppose. It only gets really annoying when he blower-vacs outside our bedroom window – although we are usually out of bed by that time anyway.
There are also several other gardeners who do adjoining blocks at other times of the week – although they are often during the day, which is not quite as annoying I guess. But when you work from home, having to put up with all these very annoying devices all week long can get painful.
This morning a new evil emerged. Gardeners started up the blower-vac at the community centre behind our block of units (again, right outside our bedroom window) at about 7:15am. Now, it would generally be a reasonable assumption that people would be up and out of bed by that hour on a Monday morning if they are going to work – my wife certainly was.
However, not everyone works 9-5 Monday to Friday. I tend to keep slightly different hours to normal – generally working through until around midnight, and staying in bed until 8-9 am. Since I work from home most of the time, it only ever takes me a couple of minutes to get out of bed and into the study and be on the computer.
The worst part is that they come around at between 7am and 8am and then leave. It’s quiet the rest of the day. Why can’t they do it later in the day ? Or at least do the other stuff they do first and [i]then[/i] do the blower-vac stuff – there seems to be a code of conduct which states thou shalt use the blower-vac as early as possible in the day.
I’m really not sure what this obsession with being the most annoying people in suburbia is – I’m wondering if there is some type of conspiracy being run by the gardeners ?
Signed, grumpy.
Ahhhh Sim
It’s not just gardeners. The council guys also use those god awful things before 7am ………and let’s not forget builders. Even though they aren’t supposed to “start work” before 7am, this doesn’t prevent their arrival and noisy unloading activities as early as 5am. Once we endured a concrete pour at 4am because it was mid-summer and either the concrete or the builders themselves ndo their thing best in the cool of the night. Yes, city living is just wonderful. So glad I finally moved to the quiet burbs at Xmas!!