I remember sometime back in high school that some cellular company was trying to put a base station at the top of the hill of my parent’s neighborhood. There were a ton of meetings about this with the entire neighborhood in an uproar. No one (well pretty much no one) wanted that base station put in. I remember asking my Dad what he thought.
Me: Dad aren’t you upset by this?
Dad: No, our house is the furtherest from it and will have the least property decrease.
Now that might not have been exactly how that conversation went, but for those that know my father, you know that’s pretty darn close. Anyway, I was reminded of this during this past week as I stood on top of the roof’s of various apartment buildings (which I’m sure these people didn’t have a say in whether or not a base station was put on the roof) while we (well I shouldn’t say we since I wasn’t doing the physical work, but anyway) were installing four new base stations in Tokyo. As I mentioned, I wasn’t doing any of the physical work, but one would be surprised what a beating it can be standing around…seriously! Monday wasn’t too bad, but Tuesday and Wednesday it rained both days and we had a pretty darn cold wind blowing. Being one of the people standing around making sure that everything was installed properly, this got to be pretty miserable. Especially on Wednesday as one of the sites was being brought online we started getting lightening. The roof of one of the tallest buildings in the area is NOT where you want to be when the lightening starts! Needless to say we packed up pretty darn quick and got out of there. The work continued on Thursday when it wasn’t raining, but instead I ended up with a terrible sunburn on my head before lunch. This is probably one of the worst I’ve had in quite sometime. The awesome thing that day was that we were able to see Mt. Fuji from the building we were working at. Friday was a pretty uneventful day. I played vampire and stayed out of the sun as much as possible since my head was killing me (I’m sure that some people have a joke to insert here). Next week we will finish brining the sites online and begin doing testing to ensure the system isn’t hosed. While rain is in the forecast for Monday, we are all hoping that it holds out so that we can finish on the roof’s of the apartment buildings and start with our other testing.