Daily Archives: 12th October 2019

Chainsaw School

Have you ever heard of the ‘Chainsaw School’ concept? Probably not, as it’s a cynical idea that my family and I have held for quite some time, and haven’t made all that public.

But I share it here today. It goes something like this:

There must be a school where they teach people how to use chainsaws. Not the safety and basic operation sort of stuff, like how to use the thing without chopping their own heads off, or even someone else’s.

But instead it’s the little tricks of the trade.

Like, for example, making sure that you operate your chainsaw on the only fine-weather Saturday, at the most idyllic National Trust property you can find.

The main part of the course, though, is the bit where you learn how to time it just right so that you can stop one bit of chainsawing, lull your listeners into a false sense of relief thinking that you have, finally, stopped making your racket, and then you start it up again just as they were beginning to relax a bit.

There’s also the bit about blipping the throttle like a 2-stroke motorcyclist at a traffic light, so that even when you are not chainsawing ‘proper’ you can still annoy people while they wait for you to stop.

We understand that the course is also offered as a subsidiary on other courses involving noisy power tools (like leaf blowers or angle grinders), along with the ‘builders’ language’.

As a Builder, you have to be able to shout ‘Oip?’ back and forth all the time to your mates and you all have to understand what each other means by it. The same word ‘Oip?’ can mean anything and everything pertaining to the construction industry, from ‘Pass me the pneumatic drill, please, mate’, to ‘Can’t be the end of tea break already, chaps; we’ve only just sat down!’

Enrolments on these courses are welcome every September at your local college, so you’ve missed the boat this year, I’m afraid.

However, using this description, I am glad to be able to inform my readers that now they will easily be able to recognise graduates of the Chainsaw School. You won’t be able to miss ’em.

They’ll make sure of that 😉