Jobs I will never, ever, ever take...

[debgeisler]

...even to keep from starving to death: worker on a radio tower. Although the tower near Boston is 1000 ft. tall, the worker is believed to have "only" fallen 500 ft. to his death.

Only.

Not happenin'.

Comments

me too

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

Not jumping out of any perfectly good airplanes either. Nope.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

Amen! And condolences to his family, friends, and co-workers.

Only time I ever got vertigo sitting in front of a computer was when someone sent me a picture. A large, high resolution picture. Taken from the very top of what was at the time, the tallest structure in North America. A TV antenna tower in one of the Dakotas.

I was looking at it, and I was like, Okay. Picture by a guy in the tower of the guys at the bottom of the tower. Then I realized. Those little guys down there. They were standing at the work platform at the top of the tower. The picture was taken from the top of the 250 foot tall antenna that was on top of the 2000 or so foot tall tower. And that little brown line down there with the tiny colored rectangles were the access road and the work trucks of the crew. Whoah!

[nojay.livejournal.com]

I did tower work in my youth a couple of times, rigging radio antennas for the local amateur radio repeater group (GB3CS). I was working at the four hundred foot level, not the top of the tower which was for TV broadcast and dangerous to be near when it was powered up.

The old hand who was lead on the rig drilled the three-point harness system into us before we started; three harness lanyards clipped to the safety rails, disconnect only one at a time and reconnect before the next move. As he explained it if one of us did fall we'd be killed by impacts with the tower on the way down but we might land on someone on the ground and hurt them which was a no-no. The view was nice second time up as the first time was climbing up through a belt of driving rain.

I used to be scared of heights but not so much now. I'm worried by them though and that encourages me to be careful and not take risks I don't have to.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

I have enormous empathy for anyone who triple-checks and uses triple redundancy on safety equipment.

And you have my admiration for being able to work at 400 ft., as well as my belief that you are mad.