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Comment by hex4def6 | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure that was laziness, not foresight on their behalf. Builders leave a lot of trash in walls.

Not very useful to find once you've crushed up half the existing tiling.

Breaking up the 50 year old concrete pad near my house, I found old 1970s crushed beer cans buried under the concrete (the kind that predate the attached pull-tab). Kind of a neat link through time, imagining them sweating in the same sort of heat that I was.

Of course, it might also explain some of the other 'questionable' issues in the construction that I keep finding...

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After many years of hiring contractors, my belief is many are drunk all day long. I have found empty hard liquor bottles on finished work sites many times. It could be because their bodies are in pain, but I have a good friend whose a painter who began his career at 16 in NYC and he said they always had a case of beer at 3pm.

They're definitely drunk and reckless in the afternoon. Here in Sydney, at least, utes (aka pickups) drive like absolute maniacs around 3pm, no doubt as they're heading to/from the pub.

I often see things like this on TV and it annoys me to no end.

Our main character drives up to a pub/bar/restaurant of some sort, sits by the counter and orders an alcoholic drink. Proceeds to drive elsewhere later as though DUI laws didn't exist.

The legal limit is not 0 in most places.

While any driving under the influence is inadvisable, most likely an adult having a single drink of the kind of beer you’d today get in a bar like that, is probably under the legal limit. Unless you weigh 120lbs or something.

As long as you’re not chugging it, drinking a 12oz 4.5% ABV beer probably won’t be over the limit.

I personally like the characters who seem not under the influence of law.

There are a lot of functioning alcoholics in the world, in all sorts of professions... there are probably a lot of people working in offices drunk most of the day.

There is probably a historical element. Bricklayers and other tradesmen have traditionally been drinking beer (or cheap, watered-down wine) at lunchtime throughout Europe for centuries, since it was cheap, refreshing, and packing calories; in the past, alcoholic contents were significantly lower-grade, so it didn't interfere dramatically with their work.

Add to it that, in the XIX century, "functioning alcoholism" was basically the norm for most men.

Obviously things are different today: alcoholic drinks are now built explicitly to get you drunk as fast as possible, and hence are increasingly incompatible with modern living and working practices.

I think this is a case of both. For example my parents did a remodel of a 19th century house and found a bag of glass catseye marbles in the ceiling.

My neighbours found loads of trash in their back yard as they were digging it up because the original job was shit too, they found a complete / intact toilet pot and things like that.

I got some pet rabbits that roam free in our yard and as they've been working on creating various burrows all over the place, they've been pulling out insane amounts of bricks and stone rubble.

Impressive on the rabbits end, pretty infuriating on the builders end.

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