Gonna Have To Be Hard-Headed Over The Hard Hats

My father ran a construction company and was hired to update a utility line that ran through a local zoo. As they were preparing to start the project, the zoo director came up to my dad.

Director: “Okay, we are glad you are all here and we appreciate that you have taken all the precautions we asked for the well-being of our animals. And we know it’s a very long list of requests.”

Dad: “Well, grant you it was a long list of requests, and I won’t lie some are annoying like no one is allowed to wear yellow because it makes the monkeys mad, but it’s a small price to pay to create as little stress for the animals as we can.”

Director: “Yes, well, we have one more. Around the elephants, we have to ask that none of you wear hard hats.”

Dad: “What?”

Director: “Well, it upsets them for some reason.”

Dad: “Okay, we have a problem then. It’s a safety requirement. If a state safety inspector comes by, and they will, and finds any of my men without a hard hat on, they will nail us with huge fines.”

Director: “We need to figure something out because they will get agitated and charge the fences. They have before.”

Fortunately, they only had to work on about two hundred feet at the edge of the enclosure. What should have been a simple installation of new pipelines became a battle plan. Someone would try to keep the elephants busy at one end of the enclosure with new toys, and if they wandered over to see what the workmen were doing, the men would take their hats off.

A zoo employee would “stand guard” at the zoo entrance and would call over a walkie-talkie to my dad and the director if a safety inspector showed up. By the end of the week, all the pipeline was done, all the animals were happy and undisturbed, and the director saw to it that all the workers got free admission tickets for themselves and their families.

My dad said it was the weirdest job he had ever done in over fifty years, and frankly, the most stressful.