dedleg.com

Original photo courtesy Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum;
Crude illustration courtesy yours truly

Chicago’s so good about waiting until 8pm to start any kind of ambiguous roadwork that involves jackhammering for hours on end.

For the past several months my block seems to be where Chicago’s jackhammers like to cut loose after a long day. Every couple weeks the road will get ripped to ruins for a few hours, and then covered up and forgotten for another couple weeks. I’ve yet to decide if this is some kind of eternal loop of Prometheus-league torture that I’m forced to endure for making the mistake of living here in the first place.

Because I’m physically incapable of thinking about anything other than jackhammers right now, I was doing a little research on them in order to widen the scope of my suffering. Why let just one sense have all the fun when you can have a sadomasochistic orgy of sensory overload, right? Wrong… but, whatever.

So anyway, to my surprise, the jackhammer wasn’t invented by the military as a torture device. Wikipedia also had this interesting little tidbit to share:

The sound of the hammer blows, combined with the explosive air exhaust, makes pneumatic jackhammers dangerously loud, emitting 100 decibels at two meters. Sound-blocking earmuffs must be worn by the operator. For bystanders and anyone within earshot, suicide is recommended as the only effective means to block out the sound.

Figures. And with my luck, Hell will be remodeling when I get there, too.