Chinese Acrobats

I thought Chinese acrobats were primarily found in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai where they astonish and delight hordes of tourists passing through. However, lately I’ve become convinced that a few acrobats have fled their former occupation and moved into my backyard. My backyard where construction proceeds ALL. HOURS. OF. THE. EVER. LOVING. DAY. AND. NIGHT. Not that I mind in the least the incessant hammering and whirring.

Ahem, sorry, I got a bit off track there. Back to the acrobats. The great thing about having acrobats on your construction team is that you can forgo normal safety precautions. Acrobats can scamper along crane arms nine stories high with no wires or harnesses.

Acrobats are also useful {and here’s where I reveal my paucity of construction knowledge} when balancing on, uh, is it rebar? Sure, we’ll go with that. Balancing on rebar doing something.

Shall we take a closer look?

Yes, each man is balancing the other’s weight. One wrong shift and both are going flying.

But simply balancing their weight would require hardly any acrobatic skill. No, the acrobatic skill comes into play with the fact that the rebar is constantly and quite dramatically swaying. We’re talking swaying like the pendulum in a grandfather clock.

I think we can remove Chinese construction from the list of careers I’d be willing to do in the future.