Do you get paid to do this?

Do you get paid to do this?

Next time you are waiting at Wrocław station, watch out for the man with the hammer.  He's not a state-employed vandal but in charge of thousands of people's safety.  It doesn't take long to figure out why, but there are still some out there who don't know why someone gets paid to tap train wheels with a hammer every day.  As I'm sure you will have guessed, if he taps the wheel and it goes 'Clang', he knows the wheel is there.  If, however, it does not go 'Clang', then it means the train has left.  Don't believe the old music-hall joke that he's listening for cracks in the metal tyre surrounding the wheel.  People have been telling that old one for years!

They stopped using wheel-tappers in Britain many years ago.  They still use a bugler though.  This man has to stand next to the railway line, with his musical instrument in his hand, doing nothing more than watching the track for an oncoming train.  When he sees one, he sounds a long note on the bugle, which gives about half a minute for the workmen to get off the line.  I don't know how his wages compare with the philharmonic orchestra, but I bet the rehearsals are much easier.  By the way, his official job title is 'lookout'.

If you haven't got an ear for music, you could just get paid to stand still (and occasionally walk forward a couple of steps).  It's not regular employment but when the police need to identify a suspect they need to employ people of a similar height and appearance to stand in the same line.  This is to make sure that the crime victim actually selects the person the police have arrested, rather than just saying 'Yes, it's him!' to the first face they see.  Unfortunately you don't get your own job title, let alone a business card, but there's a little bit of money in it.

For me, the strangest job that I have seen someone do is a professional bird-scarer.  Although I have not met one of these people in person, I saw one talking about his work on television about twenty years ago.  He has to stand next to an airport runway and frighten the birds away.  If the birds didn't take off before the aeroplane did, they could be in the way of the plane's engines when they finally did decide to fly away.  You might think that frightening the birds away was a simple job of firing a gun or sounding a horn, but this man had a far simpler, although unusual, method.  He simply stood next to the runway and flapped his arms up and down for about ten seconds.  This, he said, was enough to make the birds think there was a larger predator standing near them.  At least, that's what he said in his job interview.

Glossary

a hammer                                młotek

to figure out                           znaleźć

to guess                                  odgadnąć

a crack                                    pęknięcie

a tyre                                      opona

to surround                             otoczyć

oncoming                               nadjeżdżający

a rehearsal                              próba

to have an ear for music         mieć dobry słuch muzyczny

occasionally                            od czasu do czasu

a victim                                  ofiara

let alone                                  a co dopiero

a runway                                pas startowy

to scare = to frighten              przerazić

a horn                                     róg

Wordsearch

The wheel-tapper uses a hammer, which is a kind of tool.  There are nine more tools in the grid below.  How many can you find?

KEY

screwdriver, drill, saw, pliers, spirit level, plane, spanner, penknife, chisel

Did you know?

Two people have the job of running the bath for Queen Elizabeth II each morning.

On the Tokyo underground railway,  there used to be attendants to push the crowds of passengers onto the trains at busy times of the day.

There is at least one American town where, according to the law, every motorist must hire someone to run in front of them with a warning flag.  Whether there are any flag runners is another question.