Shadow Flaggin

While it sounds like some badass alternate form of flagging you learn when you level up, shadow flagging is just following a brush cutter in a truck for the entire day. Ten hours sitting in the truck, traveling a top speed of 4 or 5 miles an hour. It's more than possible to fall asleep when a wagon could pass you on it's way up the Oregon Trail. The only upsides are random moments when everything looks gorgeous.

Not Flaggin

On the rare occasions that we temps don't flag, we either get to follow around a full timer and try to not be annoying all day, or we get cut loose and given some random endless assignment just to keep us busy and out of the way.

Last week, my fellow flagger Bo and I were given the task of weedeating bridges, guardrails, and jersey barriers on several roads in the middle of nowhere. Now say what you want, but the novelty of weedeating really starts to wear off around the fourteenth or fifteenth hour. The high point of this was that we cleared around a covered bridge that I had no idea was even there.

I also saw a lizard.

Flaggin

Currently I work as a temp at the county road department in my home area. It's a great job, but also the most insanely boring job in the world at times. 6:30am to 5:00pm, monday through thursday. Most of the time, I'm out on some backroad that maybe 6 other people know about, standing in place for the entire day, sometimes without seeing a single car to let through. It's AWESOME.

The upside to all of this is that when you're standing in the same place for ten hours, you usually end up seeing something cool. I've seen hawks grab snakes out of fields, beavers running across roads, and the occasional county resident flipping me off over something I have no knowledge about. I try to take pictures when I can with my shitty phone, but a few of them turn out pretty nice.

 

The crew had to put a huge fish culvert in the road over 4 days, the culvert was in three sections. Each time we put one section in, we had to bury it all the way, move the excavator on top of it, and dig another pit where the excavator had just been, all to keep the tiny amount of traffic on that road moving. It sucked. I walked into one of the waiting sections and took this on break.