Jimway
Well-known member
So recently I've been busy working along. Got a jobsite where we had to run a couple of hundred feet of conduit for an underground service lateral to a new home. We are out on site first thing in the morning. It's cold and frosty. Excavator operator shows up about an hour late (I would have dug the ditch already but he has the key to the excavator). So he starts the machine up and flips the throttle to high idle and begins to move the machine. I quickly offer up some sound advice as to maybe it might be prudent to warm up the machine for a few minutes. Operator looks at me with disdain and states that we're burnin daylight! The end cap promptly blows off of one of the track drive motors and gallons of hydraulic oil sprays all over as he starts to move the machine again. I drop my head so that my chin touches my chest and shake my head back and forth. I quick call up the owner of the machine and give a situation report. He expends approximately half of his swear word vocabulary, tells me he is almost to the site, and hangs up. I make another couple of calls to locate a new drive motor. Owner shows up and he and the operator get into a verbal right off the bat. Operator stomps off to his truck and roars off. Owner comes over and sits down next to me on the tailgate of my truck in complete disgust. I tell him that I located a new wheel motor and if we go get the dump truck and trailer, right now, we can load up the machine before it pumps all of the hydraulic oil out on the ground. We can take it back to his shop, pressure wash it and remove and replace the wheel motor and probably be digging first thing in the am. He tells me that there is something wrong with the dump truck and was gonna ask me to look at it if I would. My chin hits my chest again.