Tree trimmers

I have been sitting on this photo for about 2 weeks for some reason. Just too lazy to log in and upload it I guess, that and the constant Ju distraction is making it difficult to sit down and finish anything online in a consistant time frame.

These are the tree trimmers of Coelba (electric company). Not that you can usually see the electric lines from the street anyway, but the overgrown trees do seem to become too overgrown and then they show up and trim peices off here and there at odd hours, like 7 am on a Sunday. There were 5 guys in this truck. In this photo, two of them were somewhere else picking up branches off the ground and dragging them either to this truck or into piles on the street. I have no idea what conditions allowed for one branch to enter the truck while others were left behind. There did not seem to be any commonly observable rule.

The truck would slowly drive along the street, stop under a random tree and extend this rickety ladder and I would not have trusted to climb on. One guy climbs up, jiggling the ladder all the way up, and starts cutting branches - with a large (and probably very very sharp) machete. This makes the shakey contraption wiggle even more and I feared I was going to witness some underpaid worker fall to his death or permanent handicap. After the branch was sufficiently hacked off with the giant knife, it would either drop to the ground where perhaps another worker would retrieve, or it would be somehow hooked on the wires you see attatched to the ladder, and shimmied down into the back of the truck. A neat contraption, but I wouldn't want to climb it and I bet in the States you'd have to sign about 30 papers stating you wouldn't sue anyone if you took off your arm somewhere in this process.