When he agreed to do the job, he didn't imagine how challenging it would be.
Transcript:
“Hey, Darrow. So, I’m a gardener, and I just got this job. Um, a building manager asked-I’m sorry. To start this correctly, a year ago at a new building I’m the gardener at, I noticed that their forty, forty-five foot tall spruce tree, which they decorate for Christmas with lights and a big star on top, it was not decorated, um, very well. The, the top two thirds of the tree were one kind of lights. And then the bottom third was a completely different set of lights. So it just, it just can’t, it doesn’t work, you know? It’s gotta be you know it’s gotta be the same lights evenly and correctly around it, so it looks good. And I commented to the building manager that “Ooh, that, you know that’s not really great”, and um she she she she knew it wasn’t right but they were stuck with it that year. And she asked me would I be willing to do it the next year, which is this year, and I said, “Yeah. Sure. I would, I could try.” So this year I’m the one who did it and um uh it was way harder than I thought! And I’ve you know back in the day Jesus you know thirty years ago when I worked for this other gardener, we would do twenty, twenty-five foot, maybe thirty foot Christmas trees indoors in lobbies. With big um A-frame ladders and you know three four or five guys helping, the lights, the ornaments, even we might have like wrapped boxes under the tree. Um, this was just lights and the star on top of the tree.
OK.
So, it’s me, one helper, and then someone from the building helped us, also. So, you’ve got to string lights together, and then when you attach two lights together, you’ve gotta use electrical tape and um you know “lock” them together, and then “lock” the water out so when it’s outside, and it could rain, you don’t want the rain to short out the connection. So, there’s stuff to do even if you’re not the one on the tree putting the lights on. I watched a YouTube video of how to do this because you know everything is on YouTube now, so I wanted to see what’s the professional way to do it, and I saw people had um long poles with a hook at the end, and you could um scoop up a string of lights, and then reach the top of the tree, and kind of you could on the ground you go around the tree with the lights. And you could get that effect of spiral spiral spiral spiral around the tree, and you could get it to be perfect. So, I had an extension pole pruner tool made in Japan I might say it’s a excellent company, ARS, a pole pruner extendo thing, and with some extra …And then I went to a hardware store and I bought a very long uh metal rod to make it even longer. And I used duct tape, attached the long rod to my pole pruner long thing, and attached a hanger, which I bent into the shape of a hook, at the end of the bar. So now I had my long pole. I could reach and pick up my strand, my string of lights, get to the top of the forty, forty-five foot tree, and then go around and around and around and around ‘cause I watched YouTube and that’s how it that’s how it goes. But it actually isn’t that easy! It’s not that easy at all! Because…well, the the my pole was kind of you know wibbly wobbly…
Oh, man! How did you let that happen?
You know, because it wasn’t really really so straight, and it was a little bit heavy. Uh, it was quite hard to maneuver. Frustratingly difficult to actually work, but it worked kind of good enough. And another problem was the building didn’t have the ladder which they had promised me they would have. They promised me they would have a thirty, forty foot ladder to do the job. But, they were having work done on the building, and the workers who were at the building had taken their ladder like two days before, and hadn’t returned it. So, they were on the phone calling this company, “You know we need that ladder now! We need it not on Friday, not on Tuesday. We need it now!” So these guys are bringing it from some other part of the city and they got the ladder to the job site. So now I have the ladder, I have my wobbly pole, I have my two helpers, and um and then we were actually making progress. And we were, it was kind of going pretty well, and especially we got many of the lights on with the pole around and around and around. That was OK. But the real doing of it was then getting on the ladder um and then stringing them more artistically down the tree. Because just going around and around was um…There were many holes in the tree. There weren’t branches everywhere. So, if you, yeah, and but you had to, at nighttime you have to have lights even in the emptiness because otherwise it would just be, it wouldn’t look good. So you have to find a way to fill in the emptiness with lights even though there was nothing to hold on to. So, there are all these little problems. And the worst problem of all um was they had a star for the top of the tree, which was on top of a metal pole, which you plugged in, and then you sent the extension, the electrical cord, down the length of the tree. Um, but I had to climb into the tree from the bottom of the tree up into this spruce tree. And, forty, forty five year old, fifty year old spruce trees um don’t remove the dead branches that are inside of them. All of the branches that are part of the tree stay with the tree until they leave the tree. So, as you’re trying to climb up inside of this tree , which at some point had been cut at the top, ‘cause now it had three leaders, it didn’t just have like one main trunk, it actually then had three. So, now you are climbing in the middle of three to get up to the top. And then, it had all these dead branches inside of it, so the space was extremely narrow. And you know I’m a small person anyway but you know the first time I heard, “Riiipp!” You know, my, one of my nice green shirts, I heard it go, “Rip!” And I was like OK. I know when you’re dealing with roses, when you’re dealing with thorns, when you’re dealing with, like, if you hear it rip or pull, don’t keep going. You have to stop, and you kind of have to find your way back out. ‘Cause otherwise you’ll just rip more. But it was such a tight spot, and I’m holding duct tape, and a scissors, um and then of course we have masks ‘cause it’s Covid time now. So, it’s really uncomfortable to be in this tree, and I’m just getting, so I basically have to just move, ‘cause I can’t just stay there, can’t get out, ‘cause I’m just, every time I move, I’m hitting some other thing, and I’m, I really, I’m still all scratched up, on my back and on my body. And I finally got to the top of the tree. Pushed the star up through the middle. And um my helpers down below, I’m like, “OK. You know. Is it straight now?” You know I duct taped part of it, and then I’m like wibbly wobbly trying to get, “Is it straight now?” And like one of the helpers was a woman, and she’s like,…and I’m like, “I can’t hear you. Louder.” And I’m like in pain, everything is pushing and poking and scratching me. And it’s like she’s like…”Loud. You’ve got to say louder.” so, finally she, her voice got louder. And it was like we got it up to the thing, and then we duct tape tied it to the right place. And it was good enough. And I came back down. And I was scratching myself more and more, and we got down and um and then, luckily you know the sun goes down earlier now, and it’s getting darker, so then we got to put the lights on and see what we were doing. ‘Cause in the daytime you couldn’t really see how good it was.
Right. Exactly.
You need to see it at night, lit. Then you know. Right. Then you know. Right right right. So, it was getting that dark. We put the lights on. We got to see. “Oh, we’re going to have to make adjustments.” And adjustments. And I sent a photo to the building manager at the end of the job. And the next day she said that it uh it had never been done so good. So, we did a, we did a, good enough, we did a good job.
She said that. All right. So you’re a…
And I went back…
…real artist after all, Sam.
I’m a something. Or the standard was so low that I,you know, just getting above, getting above last year. It’s always the best way to be a worker is come in to a job that the previous worker was really bad. ‘Cause then you can just do an average job. You’re golden. You know it’s like it’s…”
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