Weather & Pours
Concrete Truck 'Five Minutes Away' Enters Fourth Hour, Physicists Called To Site
Set up at 6:40. Primed by 7. The agi has been 'five minutes away' since 7:20. Physicists say time itself breaks once concrete is ordered.
WESTERN SYDNEY — A concrete truck described by the batch plant as 'five minutes away, mate' has now been five minutes away for close to four hours, in what experts are calling the strongest evidence yet that time itself behaves differently once concrete has been ordered.
The pump operator arrived at 6am as booked. Set up by 6:40. Primed and ready before 7. The first agi was due at 7 sharp. At 7:20 it was five minutes away. At 8:15 it was five minutes away. At 9:40, sources close to the plant confirmed the truck remained, quote, 'literally five minutes away.'
A New Field Of Science
A physicist brought to site to investigate said the phenomenon defied every known model. 'In normal spacetime, an object travelling toward you gets closer,' she said. 'This truck exists in a state we're calling batch-plant relativity. It is always five minutes away. It has always been five minutes away. It may never arrive, and it may also, somehow, have already been and gone.'
The driver, when finally reached, said he was 'just around the corner.' Analysis of the corner in question found it was a servo 40 minutes away, where the driver was weighing up a chicken schnitty roll against a pie. Asked why the plant had said the truck left at 7 when it was parked in the yard until 8:30, a spokesperson said the data was 'being reviewed' and hung up.
The Waiting Time Reckoning
Meanwhile, the operator did what operators do. Checked the lines. Checked the boom. Rang the plant twice, the builder once, and his wife to say don't wait up. He also ate lunch at 9:15am, which every operator will understand. Then he started the waiting-time clock, which, unlike the truck, moves at a normal and billable speed.
The builder, informed that waiting time starts when the pump is set up and ready and not whenever the concrete finally graces the site, described the charge as 'outrageous', despite being the person who ordered the concrete, chose the plant and confirmed the start time twice.
'Funny thing,' the operator said. 'The pump got booked in about two minutes on PumpXchange. The machine that costs serious money every hour it sits there was organised faster than the product it exists to move. Make that make sense.'
Veteran operators note the five-minutes-away phenomenon has been observed on every job since the invention of concrete. 'The Romans had it too,' one said. 'You can see it in the ruins. Half-finished columns everywhere. Truck never showed.'
Truck Arrives, Immediately Suspicious
The agi finally rolled through the gate at 10:52am. The load, batched shortly after 7, was described by the driver as 'still sweet' and by everyone else present as 'a returned load with a personality.' The slump was described as 'a matter of opinion.'
A second truck was immediately dispatched. At time of press, it was five minutes away.
The Blow Out is PumpLife's satirical news desk. It is not real. Mostly.
Satire, obviously.PumpLife is a satirical publication about the concrete pumping and concrete industry. The stories here are made up for a laugh and are not statements of fact. Any resemblance to a real operator, concreter, pump or smoko is a coincidence.
