Terradon
Gor-rok
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The other day my crew was called to take a bunch of big broken and decayed limbs out of the top of an old locust tree in front of a local community center. The center takes care of people with mental and physical disabilities, and many of them are in pretty bad shape. The path in front of it connects two campuses of a large university, so the traffic is about 70% students and the rest, disabled people going into the center.
We set large bright orange safety cones all around the area we planned to drop the limbs, making sure people had a path to get around. My foreman stayed on the ground to keep people out of the area, and I went up and started cutting. Just as I got ready to drop about sixty pounds of wood into the target area, class let out somewhere, and students started flooding down the path, right through our cones. My foreman yelled at them to go around while waving his arms, and maybe two listened. The rest were too busy text messaging, listening to ipods, talking on the phone, flirting, or just staring at the ground to be bothered, and plowed right through. None ever looked up to see the branch suspended over their heads forty feet up.
At the same time, several individuals, clearly severely handicapped, came down the path and approached the building entrance. Each one of them, in turn: 1) saw the cones 2) looked up in the tree 3) went around the cones.
Even after the classes changed there was still steady traffic on the path from both groups, and the previous scenario went on, verbatim, for two and a half hours (and the job should have taken 45 minutes). Not one college student avoided the work area of their own accord, and not one single handicapped person entered it.
For my part, there was only one group of people there that the term "retarded" applied to.
We set large bright orange safety cones all around the area we planned to drop the limbs, making sure people had a path to get around. My foreman stayed on the ground to keep people out of the area, and I went up and started cutting. Just as I got ready to drop about sixty pounds of wood into the target area, class let out somewhere, and students started flooding down the path, right through our cones. My foreman yelled at them to go around while waving his arms, and maybe two listened. The rest were too busy text messaging, listening to ipods, talking on the phone, flirting, or just staring at the ground to be bothered, and plowed right through. None ever looked up to see the branch suspended over their heads forty feet up.
At the same time, several individuals, clearly severely handicapped, came down the path and approached the building entrance. Each one of them, in turn: 1) saw the cones 2) looked up in the tree 3) went around the cones.
Even after the classes changed there was still steady traffic on the path from both groups, and the previous scenario went on, verbatim, for two and a half hours (and the job should have taken 45 minutes). Not one college student avoided the work area of their own accord, and not one single handicapped person entered it.
For my part, there was only one group of people there that the term "retarded" applied to.
