You never know what you're going to end up doing at this job. Today, it was picking out small grey pebbles from a rockpile of thousands of stones. Tomorrow, well, it could hardly get crazier, could it?
When you're sorting pebbles, especially small pebbles of less than 10mm, you start to think all sorts of crazy thoughts. I tried to focus only on how funny it was that, yes, here I am sorting pebbles. Eventually though, I couldn't help but do some math...
1.5 tonnes of pebbles
1 cubic metre of pebbles
each handful including 15 pebbles
handfuls averaging 3 reject pebbles
handfuls weighing, say, 100g of pebbles
10 handfuls in a kilogram of pebbles
1000 kilograms in a tonne of pebbles...
10,000 handfuls of pebbles
150,000 pebbles
30,000 reject pebbles...
All those white pebbles at Bunnings, do you think that they are hand-sorted in China or India
Factories sorting pebbles?
What about the historic 'New Zealand pebbles' that monumental masons used to sell at Rookwood?
Are there beaches of perfect pebbles?
People paid to actually pick and bag pebbles....?
Well, it's rather boring... pebbles this and pebbles that.
Matthew was away on holiday and Shannon was off with an injured ankle, so it fell to the apprentice Damian to anchor the sorting job... but, oddly, it was myself and Grahame who survived it best. We had thought that a very simple job where you could chat on speakerphone all day or listen to music, well, wouldn't it be a perfect job for an apprentice? Turns out, no. It was us old-timers who could do it... and it was like I was killing Damian whenever I tried to leave him there. Maybe the pile was too big? Maybe he did a version of the math too? I think he would have rather that we pulled out some of his teeth. So we did it... although we eventually settled on sorting out a reasonable number only... which ate away any profit we might have made... but did give us an excellent result!
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| Pebbles locked into the bottom of the concrete infill when the vault was 'fixed' in the 70s or 80s! |
The good part, and why we ended up doing such a crazy job, is that we really did have an almost perfect match with the original historic pebbles. Grant found a mass of them on the underside of the concrete render completed in the so-called restoration work done in the 1970s (?), so we knew exactly what had been there. We searched locally in Maitland (where we had had wonderful success at Saddington's... an awesome old-time outdoor, landscaping, hardware everything-it-should-be store) but couldn't source them... then tried online... and ended up driving around Sydney too. We ended up finding a nearly perfect match... just with slightly too much of the grey and rusty-yellow. The original pebbles did have both, but in a slightly reduced proportion. So it seemed that, having gotten so close, well, we should really go all the way and get things as exactly right as we could.
So, somehow, Grahame, Damian and I spent a good part of a day picking pebbles
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