Wisconsin Builder | Job Satisfaction

Secret admirers

My 3-year-old daughter loves tower cranes.

She’s known how to say tower crane since shortly after she learned how to speak.

She came upon her interest in a pretty natural way. Kids like tall things, and every day on our way to school, we see tower cranes everywhere.

Most nights, on our way home, we can see the safety lights on the tops of the cranes, which is pretty neat when there are several cranes on one project. It’s like a set of blinking Christmas lights in the sky.

Now, as her inquisitiveness grows with her age, she wonders what the cranes do, why people use them, why they lift such heavy things. It’s an endless list of why questions, but who can fault a person’s curiosity, especially as it applies to such prominent pieces of their environment.

And surely my daughter isn’t the only one who looks at a construction site and wonders what those people are doing, why they’re doing it, if they’re cold in the winter or hot in the summer, and if they’re having fun working outside. Paul Snyder, in the following pages, tells the story of one woman who spent much of her time in the hospital asking many of those same questions about the same tower crane my daughter likely pointed to one day and yelled, “Tower crane!”

The fact is practically every person who works in the field in construction is, at one time or another, the center of someone’s attention. People watch you. You’re on a stage.

And I’ll bet you don’t even notice. You’ve got a job to do, and you can’t spend your time looking over your shoulder or wondering who’s watching.

That’s fine. You don’t have to notice, and you don’t have to worry about setting good examples, keeping curses to a minimum or smoking (if you got ’em) in discreet places. Most of us don’t get close enough to hear you or see specifically what you’re doing anyway.

And, frankly, most of us don’t care. If a construction site can light up my daughter’s eyes, keep a sick woman company or just give someone eating lunch outside something to look at, what more can we ask? That alone is, to borrow my daughter’s latest phrase, pretty cool.