The city never sleeps
Published by on November 13th, 2008 2 Comments »
I cannot honestly claim to be a seasonal traveler, but the miles are certainly mounting up these days – at least when compared to past years.
As I write this, I am sat – very comfortably, and with a belly full of pizza, I should add – in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, downtown San Francisco. Just a block north (ish) from Union Square Park, the hotel cannot be missed due to the absurd Beefeater-dressed doorman, pheeping whistles and hustling guests in and out of cabs. Now let’s not get into the rather tentative connections between Drake and Beefeaters, they are both very British and that’s clearly enough around these parts.
The hotel is well dressed without being pretentious, and you know takes its in-room entertainment seriously when the every adult movie package assure you of “anal sex in every scene”.
The most challenging aspect of staying here – beyond a wifi connection with a mind of its own as to what you can access, when, and for how long (you should have paid the $10 per day option! I hear you cry) – is the city itself. I had forgotten the level of noise a city creates throughout the night.
There’s the doorman’s piping, the dinging bells of the Powell Street trolleys (one driver has a deliberately rhythmic tune), the constant, deep throated traffic, plus a sprinkle of meandering, homeless shouters.
I woke at just after 4 a.m. one night to an almighty, echoing, boom! Followed promptly by another. My first thought was a storm where the thunder had been distorted after bouncing its way through the city tower blocks. But the sound was hollow, as though a giant drum was being played just outside. Another bang, without the expected preceding flash and I had to investigate.
It might have well been a giant drum. It was skip swapping time on Powell Street.
The renovations in the hotel opposite had filled the roadside skip enough to need replacement. I say skip only in the its practical sense, it was in fact an open topped container, with dimensions that would not look out of place on a ship carrying cheap Chinese goods across any ocean. It was a veritable “skiptainer”!
Our hapless, time-oblivious skiptainer delivery chap had arrived and dropped, quite literally, the new, empty skiptainer in the middle of the road – thus the sounds that had roused me. The technique to remove the skiptainer from the truck was to tip the rear until it slid off and slammed into the road. Then, to drive the truck forwards while scraping the rear of the skiptainer across the road, using the barely sufficient friction of its surface to hold the skiptainer in place, eventually letting it crash off the truck once free.
Now time to move the full skiptainer so the empty one could replace it. Simple enough, perhaps, unless, like our lovable, time-oblivious driver, you moved full skiptainer to a position preventing recovery of empty skiptainer!
More dragging, scraping, and slamming into the road later and full skiptainer had been moved while empty skiptainer had found itself in its alloted place.
But wait… it’s not quite correctly aligned.
Our glorious skipcaptain concludes it would be far too much effort to recover empty skiptainer once more to the trailer in order to move it a mere metre or two. Much better to reverse his truck, slamming it repeatedly into empty skiptainer until, after many chassis-twisting collisions – and associated echoing booms – empty skiptainer had been hammered into place.
I stood in my fifth floor window watching this in such amazement I never thought to capture the event with a video camera. And before retiring I noticed that not one of the other hotel windows I could see were revealing signs of other disturbed sleepers. I suppose some people are more suited to the sounds of inner city at night.
2 Responses to “The city never sleeps”
*offers virtual earplugs*
Dang, I should have used my sure earbuds, that would have killed most of it!