Well I've had a 'fun' couple of days!
A friend of mine called me Sunday asking if I could help with some work on Monday, I usually just say no but he said it was moving a 'tavolo' from one building in Rome to another about 800 meters away using a cart, stupidly I agreed....
Turns out the 'tavolo' was not a table as I expected but a 4m scaffolding plank which he wanted to use to drop a 2000 year old piece of Roman marble weighing at least 200kg mounted to a wall about 2m high, I basically spent the entire day yesterday trying to convince him to rent a lift to take it down safely, this was before I found out it was worth over half a million Euros!
Then he hit me in the face when the grinding disc exploded, not enough to cause injury but enough to royally piss me off!
With the assurance that he had procured the right tools for the job we went back today to finish the job, he had a bolt with a loop welded to it and a pulley... but no drill, by now the client was getting annoyed!
It takes a while but he finds a drill, mounts the bolt, straps the marble and there I am holding a piece of rope while he grinds off the last mounts, I have never used pulleys before, I had no idea if it would ease down or if the rope was going to yank me across the room! I now understand why people use pulleys, easy peasy!
We get one corner of the marble touching the floor, other side still has an inch to go, I'm pretty much out of rope and he's taking a victory lap saying there was no need for the anger earlier to the client! .... Finish the f'ing job before gloating! Better still, don't gloat and get the right tools/people!
I did video the process but the client asked to keep it private but here is a photo of the piece before we took it down:
Not much was known of its origins but it is at least 2000 years old!
Never working for a friend again, you'd think I'd have learnt that lesson the last three times- hernia, hernia and head through windscreen! 馃が Glad I didn't add destruction of priceless history to the list! 馃ぃ
Good to get away from the computer screen though and it was a beautiful part of Rome!
I'm going to bed, sorry for the rant!
Frugal
