My family has always scoffed at my lifting as unnecessary wear on my body and inapplicable strength in the real world. Well, my uncle cast a concrete cistern lid for a lady he was doing a home remodel for. 1 side weighed 600 pounds and the other 800 pounds. Got 6 of us and put 3 on each side of the bracket he built us to lift/carry it down off the trailer and 150 feet through snow into the house.
The crew tried 3 per side (me included) and could only get a few feet at a time. After the 4th budge attempt the other 5 were sucking wind and I looked like I hadn’t done anything. So I told them to do 4-5 on the front and leave me on the back by myself. Made it from the bottom of the trailer into the basement of the house with both pieces and only needed one rest halfway with each. I catch a little less shit from my family for lifting now.
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I was 16 years old at the time. We were staying at a Hotel at downtown Toronto on vacation with my Mom, Dad and little brother. We were on the fifth floor all in one room sleeping. The fire alarm went off at 4 30 am. We all woke up in a panic. My parents didn’t know it was a fire alarm. I screamed the Hotel was on fire and we had to get out immediately or get burned alive. I ran to the door to get out. In my panic I forgot the door was locked and bolted. I was in such a frenzy because I thought we were going to die! I ripped the door off it’s hinges and frame and bent the door handle. People were screaming and running crazily through the 32 story Hotel thundering down the emergency fire stairwell exits .We got to safety but found out some idiot deliberately set off a false alarm. The Hotel manager later came up to see the damage I had done to the door after my father reported what I had happened. He just shook his head and said he never saw anything like that or heard of something like that ever. He didn’t charge us for the damage either which my father was more worried about.
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Ive been in construction for years, and Ive done some heavy work, but 2 instances come to mind.
First was a retaining wall i built in my own yard. Took 3 days off work in NY in August to do it, and needed to get it done in that time. The wall is 3 sides of my yard, about 100’ across the back and 30’ each side. Total was about 240 8’ long true 6x6 landscape ties. Each one needed 4 10" long landscape spikes (huge nails) put in to hokd them. So in 3 days in 90+ degree heat, i moved all 240 ties from my front yard to the back, set them and nailed almost 1000 10" nails in with a 12lb sledge in those 3 days. Needless to say i took those 3 days off from the gym.
Then last summer, i had 2 big trees come down in my yard, and was too cheap to pay a tree company. So i chopped them up myself, and loaded my truck 6x for trips to the dump. After i cut everything up, i realized i shouldve cut cut everything shorter, but i had basically killed the chain on my saw at that point and didnt want to take the time to go get a new one and cut everything smaller so i made it work.
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