Thought of the Day 04.13.10

This weekend I did a brand new and horrible thing: I helped a friend tear out his concrete patio by operating a jackhammer for 3 or 4 hours. Two days later, I can barely move my fingers around. Nevertheless, the experience was fascinating and insightful.

See, we had to learn everything by trial and error, and starting at total ignorance, we gradually refined our process to what seemed to work best. This involved hitting the slab with a sledgehammer four or five times until a small crack appeared (what my friend called “the tenderizer” phase). At that point, I would position the jackhammer about eight inches from the edge, regardless of where the hairline cracks showed because I always knew there were more than just the ones I could see.

Sure enough, even though the area would have looked perfectly sturdy to the casual observer, my newly trained eye knew the internal damage had always been done and a few seconds later a nice big chunk could be easily pried off. And as I was doing this, all I kept thinking about was how much experience Satan has had with his tools and how chillingly similar a concrete patio is to a marriage.