Oh jeezus- don't hit the windshield!

"We need to drop a light pole at ...Mark Twain... HS and move it to storage. How long do you think it'll take?"
"IF it's just dropping the pole and moving it, less than two hours- but you know this company and how things get left out."

"Ok, get the boom truck and meet him at the tennis courts."

So I get out there to find this metal pole is about 30' tall with two banks of sports lighting on it---AND it has foot pegs all the way up.
So I told the foreman- I can spend 45 minutes working the loop over and around those steps, or get the bucket truck- it'll probably be about the same amount of time.

Half an hour later, I'm heading up to put the sling around the pole right below the bottom arm.

As I'm getting ready to put the pole on the truck, I know the center of gravity is alot higher than usual - because of the thin, short pole and the eight ballasts on top.
I swung the pole over and was lowering it to the headache rack higher than I thought the CoG was. It was higher, but not by much, and as soon as I started to slack off the rope- the bottom kicked out because of the rack acting as a fulcrum.

As soon as the base was light enough, it started sliding back about two feet towards that expensive windshield (not exorbitant, but worth my job) until I jerked it into the air and got a better angle on the winch rope.

Then it ended up like this...


It was so ,,,unusual, that I had to drive with the 3rd stage extended about ten feet and the boom raised about a foot.


This was the view from the cab.



Then we had to pull the wire out- which was another clusterf*ck, because nobody knew where it fed from.

So did you do anything interesting at work?