I'm on a job site near Houston again...lots of foreign exchange students here from below the border.
The last UTV rented from United Rentals was stolen from us and had the GPS removed from it and slung up on a tree branch...we just found it today and the theft happened over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Before that, we had our batteries stolen off of one excavator...and that one was only accessible by boat from a nearby bayou, excavator was barged in...even the fishermen are thieves.
They brought a torch to the site to cut a hole in the rental job shack made from a sea container because we had a dozer parked at the door to prevent entry.
Our hidden game cameras have caught a lot of our people peeing on site by the secretary that downloads the pics...not much else.
We put a hidden disconnect switch inside the frame rail of a brand new John Deere tractor after the last one was stolen near Beltway 8 on a shredding job...so they ripped the dash out of this one trying to hot wire it and cut several wires, but we kept the tractor.
On the same job right off of Beltway 8, we were building trails in the middle of a 1600 acre tract for the Flood Control district and that land hasn't seen a human in 50 years, maybe more as they've owned it since the 1930s...it was literally so grown up with underbrush and briars and every kind of sticking tree or brush that you literally could not crawl through it...and I parked my pickup on a trail behind a brush clearing dozer and walked down to talk to the operator for 20 minutes or so and heard my pickup suddenly leaving...and chased after it afoot from a hundred yards away only to watch it get stuck in the freshly churned sand and a guy jump out and run to an opening in the brush that hid a set of railroad tracks that nobody knew ran through there...I guess the guy had been riding on the train or walking down the tracks out there a couple miles from anywhere and just decided he didn't like walking. Still don't know how he saw my pickup...but at least he didn't have time to steal tools out of it or make off with the rig itself.
3 months ago at 6AM one morning I was getting gas at a dimly lit gas station with no other customers and a guy walked up on me out of the dark from the direction of a crack infested motel about a half mile down the road, asking for cash to supposedly get gas for his car to get to work (he looked like Tom Hanks did when he was on that island on that Castaway movie for a couple of years and he wasn't exactly acting right)...it's a damn wonder I didn't get robbed there of a couple of thousand dollars worth of tools, or worse. He was jacked up, but at least he wasn't armed. All I had was my old Case pocket knife close, but I made sure he saw it.
That one bothered me...this country is not what it used to be. There's no responsibility for your actions anymore. Hell, I have no choice but to arm myself anymore now just to make it to the job site...while our politicians hire armed security for themselves and live in a mansion behind locked and guarded fences.
I know what the solutions are...but I can't discuss them here. Even this post will land on my Permanent Record one day in the future for wrongthink, lol.
