It was after 5 p.m. that Thursday, and I hadn’t yet installed either of the two architectural signs I had to install at the church that day. I thought I could still get them up, and then drive straight from the job to our home a few miles away, just in time for a late supper.

 

By the time I loaded the signs, bags of concrete, and some tools on my truck, it was nearing 5:30. But as determined as ever, I headed for the job site and delayed my rendezvous with Sharon and whatever she had planned for supper. 

 

The pair of signs went in grassy islands on either side of small circle drive, and the first of the four holes I dug was tough. With considerable effort, and after several minutes, I had the hole dug for one post about 20" deep and moved to dig the matching one. After digging about six inches, I hit something solid. Very solid.

 

I got out my trusty wrecking bar and began banging away at the rock or piece of concrete, or whatever was in that hole. I could have just moved the sign, but there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room here, and who knows if I would just hit it again anyway? 

 

Wham, wham, wham! Over and over I pounded away at the rock, hoping to break it into pieces or start chipping it down to size. But when I pulled my wrecking bar out of the hole, I realized why I was making no progress; the plate steel chisel end was curled up like a large Frito. 

 

This was not going well. In fact, without some more tools that hole was hopeless. Time was passing and supper was going to be waiting, and I still had three holes to dig. I decided to go on to the house, eat and recharge, then swing by the shop for some extra equipment and come back later, dark or not.

 

When I got back, I moved on over and dug the two holes for the other sign, and these were no piece of cake either. I don’t know what they used for fill dirt when they built that church, but a good part of it wasn’t dirt. It wasn’t easy or fun, but in 45 minutes or so I had dug two 20" deep holes, temporarily set the second sign, then returned to the hole to beat all holes at around 8:30 p.m. 

 

I was in for a battle, and on that hot Texas night, heat stroke wasn’t quite out of the question. Though I was putting up with the stress, I was pretty worried this all-out effort would be the end of the friend I had brought back with me. My true blue friend was my old Bosch hammer drill that was taking quite a beating, because the tool I really needed was a jack hammer.

 

Drilling holes in this rock, or whatever it was, was not easy. But in time those holes should have weakened the obstacle so it could be chipped out with a steel pipe and a sledge hammer. After two hours of unrelenting hard headed combat I had dug less than six inches. It was like drilling into a bowling ball. You could drill it full of holes but what was between the holes wasn’t going anywhere.

 

I couldn’t hear my cell phone, and about 11 p.m. my worried wife, Sharon, and son, Slade, showed up to see what had happened to me. After 30 more minutes and a few more inches, Slade and I determined that discretion was the better part of valor, and we gave up the fight. By then I had decided I had found that streaking meteorite that had fallen from the Texas sky some 30 million years before, barely missing two dinosaurs and landing in a spot that would eventually become a church yard. Just my luck. 

 

But whoever said that two holes for the same sign have to be equal? The rock had won and we carried the sign back to the shop and cut several inches off one leg and brought it back and placed it in the ground, perfectly level, set concrete around both signs and went to the house around 12:30 a.m.

 

In more than 35 years, I’ve installed many signs of all kinds, and I’ve learned how to do a diversity of these out-of-the-shop projects. However, the skill I am no better at than when I first started is predicting just how long these projects will take. Far more often than I like to admit, I’m very, very wrong, or at least unrealistically optimistic in my estimations.

 

From all this experience I have learned, however, the exact skills it would take to greatly improve my job performance in this area, and I am working on them. There are just a few. I just need to be able to see what’s under the ground, or behind a wall, and accurately predict what the weather’s going to do for however long a particular job will take. How hard can that be?

 

I’m sure you’ve mastered these skills already, and I’m just behind a bit. But if not, and you or your crew is in the same boat I’m in, at least for a while I hope you miss the buried meteors, sprinkler lines and so forth, the weather smiles on your efforts, and you have a really great month. 

—Rick