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Backstory- This happened during the summer while I was working for the Muni, Parks and Rec
It was an otherwise ordinary day and our crew of teenage manual labor workers had been split up and sent to a wide variety of areas. The section of the crew I was in had been sent to a somewhat low-income neighborhood park, with a couple of simple instructions- To clear out bushy areas (to increase visibility), cut down dead trees (Improve the aesthetics of the park), trim all trees to about six feet off the ground (visibility), and when done with all these, send the trees through an industrial wood chipper, then spread the chips around to be used as fertilizer. We could do whatever we felt like with the logs we made from the tree felling.
Only two of us were old enough and trained to use chainsaws (WOOT), and so we were going around together chopping down the trees when this elderly gentleman *cough* walked up to us (we'd stopped the chainsaw to refuel and sharpen the chain) and began to start telling us how we should be doing our jobs. My coworker and I had thought he was a Muni employee, but when we realized he didn't have an ID badge, we asked and found out he was a local resident, complaining about the gigantic mess he made. He didn't talk to ME, actually, rather to my male coworker, who tried to assure him that we WOULD be cleaning this up, and that to a given extent we DID know what we were doing. Bah. Eventually the man left, guys with wood chipper arrived.
We threw the remains of what we'd done into the wood chipper and had it come out as beautiful, wonderful wood chips which we then spread around loosely. We then had our project manager with us at the time when grumpy old man came back, complaining about the "fire hazard" these chips were.
Again, wouldn't talk to the girls on our crew, just talked to our project manager. I didn't hear the details, but it got pretty loud. Afterwards our project manager came back and apologized that we had to hear that and told us we'd done a good job and that we did better then he expected. What a mood killer, though!
The voting mention is because we found out a couple days later that the park was one of a handful that the muni had polled residents on and determined to effectively be a priority park to fix which is why it sent us that summer. So, perhaps, if that guy didn't want us there, making the park prettier and safer for all, he should've gone to the park meeting when the muni was there and said so. My guess, though, was simply that he didn't expect his tax dollars to go to a bunch of teenagers (Which, might I add, do about as good of a job as trained professionals for far less money). Oh well, you win some, you lose some.
It was an otherwise ordinary day and our crew of teenage manual labor workers had been split up and sent to a wide variety of areas. The section of the crew I was in had been sent to a somewhat low-income neighborhood park, with a couple of simple instructions- To clear out bushy areas (to increase visibility), cut down dead trees (Improve the aesthetics of the park), trim all trees to about six feet off the ground (visibility), and when done with all these, send the trees through an industrial wood chipper, then spread the chips around to be used as fertilizer. We could do whatever we felt like with the logs we made from the tree felling.
Only two of us were old enough and trained to use chainsaws (WOOT), and so we were going around together chopping down the trees when this elderly gentleman *cough* walked up to us (we'd stopped the chainsaw to refuel and sharpen the chain) and began to start telling us how we should be doing our jobs. My coworker and I had thought he was a Muni employee, but when we realized he didn't have an ID badge, we asked and found out he was a local resident, complaining about the gigantic mess he made. He didn't talk to ME, actually, rather to my male coworker, who tried to assure him that we WOULD be cleaning this up, and that to a given extent we DID know what we were doing. Bah. Eventually the man left, guys with wood chipper arrived.
We threw the remains of what we'd done into the wood chipper and had it come out as beautiful, wonderful wood chips which we then spread around loosely. We then had our project manager with us at the time when grumpy old man came back, complaining about the "fire hazard" these chips were.
Again, wouldn't talk to the girls on our crew, just talked to our project manager. I didn't hear the details, but it got pretty loud. Afterwards our project manager came back and apologized that we had to hear that and told us we'd done a good job and that we did better then he expected. What a mood killer, though!The voting mention is because we found out a couple days later that the park was one of a handful that the muni had polled residents on and determined to effectively be a priority park to fix which is why it sent us that summer. So, perhaps, if that guy didn't want us there, making the park prettier and safer for all, he should've gone to the park meeting when the muni was there and said so. My guess, though, was simply that he didn't expect his tax dollars to go to a bunch of teenagers (Which, might I add, do about as good of a job as trained professionals for far less money). Oh well, you win some, you lose some.
it's part of the old person mentality that refuses to accept that the world has changed and they have not.
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