Humor Shoveling The Driveway

Fire Hydrants Need To Be Shovelled TooMost people know what community service work is and means. But just in case you don’t know its application within the courts, community service is a penalty, used by the courts, for people who have committed infractions of the law. When someone is sentenced to community service work they are required to perform a definitive amount of hours of work, performing whatever low-end community tasks that might need to be done. The reason I know this information is because I am a community service worker. Yep, that’s right! I broke the law and as a consequence I must pay a price by picking up trash from city streets, shoveling snow and salting city sidewalks, or whatever else is asked of me by the supervisor of the work crew, and without getting paid for it. By the way, winter time is not a good time to be doing community service work, especially in the colder climates, because you’re outside all day. The fingers and toes can get awfully cold, even with gloves and boots on. However, this is also part of the penalty. But enough of that, let’s get to the fire hydrants.Now, as we all know, fire hydrants are an important part of any town or city because without them most house fires would not be containable and as a result many homes and lives would be lost. In the warm weather months fire fighters usually have a fairly clear path to neighborhood hydrants, but this is not the case during the winter season in places where snow and ice builds up, covers, and prevents the access to those water sources. Furthermore, in the immediate urgency of a fire fight, fire fighters don’t have the time to be pulling out snow shovels to dig their way to needed water outlets. However, this is a task befitting of a community service worker, at least in the eyes of the courts, city officials, and correction departments.So, what’s involved in removing snow from the area of a fire hydrant? Actually, not much at all as it’s a very simple thing to do. And perhaps that’s partly why I find this necessary task somewhat humorous, because it’s so simple. My humor is not to belittle or to devalue the purpose of such a simple task however. Sometimes we do need to experience the simple to understand the bigger things in life. But, as I worked, I was reminded of a joke about the number of people it takes to screw in a light bulb. This particular joke is a tasteless one I admit, but it applied so well to the situation I will quickly explain.There were six of us community service workers. The crew supervisor had split us up into two groups of three. He gave us our instructions which were that each group would remove the snow from around each hydrant, as well as clear a path to them, that were along both sides of a rather long road. One person in each group was given a snow shovel, one a square end shovel, and the other a garden spade. The snow wasn’t more than eighteen inches high and we could clearly see each hydrant, which in itself made the task even easier.At first we weren’t quite sure of how we would go about this task, not because we didn’t know how to use the equipment we had been issued. We had that much knowledge, at least collectively anyways. Our uncertainty was entwined with the fact that there were three of us to do a one man job, not to mention that we had been given more tools than was really necessary to do the job. For us community service workers this created a quick moment of confusion suddenly followed by laughter over the silliness of it all. This warmed us to the task at hand.At first we were concerned only about moving the snow, not how we were going to do it. Both the path to the hydrant and the area around it only needed to be wide enough for one man. So there were we shoveling snow about, tossing a shovel full here, another over there, turning to toss and nearly hitting our co-worker with the shovel, or tossing a shovel full on him, and waiting for him to toss his before the one next to him scooped again. It was kind of a disorganized way to go about doing such a simple task.After clearing the snow from a couple of these hydrants we realized in a collective type of thought that we weren’t doing much to help each other. People’s thoughts can become collective when the other people around them pay attention and respond to such things as body language. And this is exactly what happened. At the next hydrant the task was accomplished differently.Arriving at the next hydrant, the worker with the snow shovel removed the top layer of snow which was still loose and unpacked. After he shoveled several feet the worker with the flat shovel began breaking and shoveling out the layer of packed snow. The garden spade wasn’t needed because there wasn’t any ice thick enough to use it on. But don’t think that the worker who was given the spade went without work. Community service work, the correctional kind anyways, is definitely an equal opportunity employer and everyone workers equally, or close enough to it. We rotated the labor. One would shovel for a few minutes then the one not doing anything would take over, while the one that was just relieved rested. We did this rotation until the hydrant we working on was cleared of the snow that lay around it.Once we got this strategy going it took us only about five to ten minutes to clear the snow from each of the hydrants. But there was a downside to this, at least from our perspective. Because we could clear the area around those hydrants so quickly that meant the more we could get done. It goes to show that one can never beat the system. It always wins. 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