High on the Job

On a typical workday, Jeff Speed arrives at work at six-thirty in the morning. He has half an hour to climb twenty stories up to the little capsule where he works, which is at the top of a crane. He brings food with him—with only half an hour for lunch, there is no time to climb down, then back up again. While his fellow construction workers use Port-a-Pottys down on the ground, he keeps a jar up in the crane for nature’s call. “You learn not to drink too much coffee,” his site supervisor joked.

Speed has been running equipment on construction sites for twenty-five years. His training was not formal; he says he just got lucky. He started by operating smaller machinery—bulldozers, forklifts—and then had the good fortune to be around when someone needed him to operate something larger and threw him in front of the controls. He gradually moved on to bigger and bigger machinery, until he found himself two hundred feet off the ground. He’s been operating cranes for about fifteen years.

The first time was a thrill, he said, but now, “It’s kind of second nature.” He’s not always in the tall cranes; it depends on the job. He still operates forklifts and bulldozers sometimes; “I do whatever needs to be done.”

But if a crane is being used on a site, Speed is usually the one in it. “It’s hard to find good crane operators,” said Mark Brown, the superintendent at the construction site of the new Guthrie Theater. “Everyone is dependent on them.” The Guthrie has two tall cranes, including the one run by Speed, which daily perform a careful pas de deux.

Each carries heavy loads from one side of the site to another, delivers construction materials to workers on the upper floors of a building, keeping everyone working by keeping them supplied with what they need. The crane operator, in turn, is dependent on riggers on the ground, who strap on the materials and let the operator know via walkie-talkie when things are ready to be moved.

It’s a lot of stop-and-go, Speed said; sometimes everybody wants him at once, and he finds himself working through breaks, even skipping lunch. Other times, there may be a long lull when he’s not needed. “I read a book, I read a magazine,” he said. He keeps all of that stuff with him up in his miniature glass office.

Speed said he’d always wanted to operate machinery. He started on earth movers at age fourteen. “I like the challenge of being able to control something, I guess.” He appeared to set his mind on the problem from another angle, then stopped. “I’ve never really thought about why I do it. I just do it.”

His only complaint about the job is the erratic hours. He never knows in advance how long he’ll be at work. He could be stuck for fourteen hours, or he could get rained out and find himself unemployed for a week. His pay rate also varies—the taller the crane, the more he earns. Not all construction sites require the tallest kind of crane. “It’s hard to schedule life around work,” he said.

Overall, though, Speed is happy with his job, and seems to have a natural affinity for it. “You have to get to know the equipment,” he said. “You don’t want its movements to be clunky like a machine. You want them smooth. You have to control it like it was your own arm.”—Katherine Glover