Heavy Equipment Operator by Wasi River Bluegrass [Boot-up tone. Diesel crank. Banjo roll.] Verse 1 Daddy taught me torque specs ‘fore he taught me algebra Said “boy, that old Clark loader’s got more sense than some men got” We’d grease the pins at sunrise, tune the carburetor choke Then I’d spend the rainy evenings making DOS machines stay woke I learned about load balancing hauling gravel up the hill And graceful degradation from a worn-out hydraulic seal The old men spoke in symptoms, not in PowerPoint or charts “Listen close — she’s overheating” was diagnostics from the heart Chorus I ran VAX and excavator, DOS and dozer too Mainframe and Massey Ferguson from ‘82 Some folks push a keyboard, some folks move a pile of stone But every system tells the truth when you leave it alone I’m a heavy equipment operator, buddy, that much is true Half my life in server rooms, half my life in mud and fuel I’m not that kind of engineer, but I’ll take a look Then I smack the dash twice gently like the service manual book Verse 2 We had floppy disks in ziplocks riding shotgun in the truck Beside a chain and binder and a thermos full of luck The county road would wash out every spring along the bend So I learned redundancy before I knew that term meant “friend” A backhoe taught me bandwidth when the clay got cold and hard And every failing bearing sounded like a pager in the dark You can’t ignore vibration when the whole machine complains That’s true for iron engines and for overclocked-out brains Chorus I ran VAX and excavator, DOS and dozer too Mainframe and Massey Ferguson from ‘82 Some folks write in Python, some still weld and fabricate But every system has a point where overload becomes your fate I’m a heavy equipment operator, trying not to spin Document the risk, boys, then grease the joints again The shovel’s the only banjo I ever learned to play But both’ll move a crowd around if you lean into the weight Bridge Well the young kids talk of cloud stacks and AI pipelines now I just ask about the failover and where the backups route ‘Cause every fancy dashboard’s still a gearbox underneath And every human operator still needs half a night of sleep A dozer blade’ll teach humility in less than half a day And uptime ain’t a culture if the crew all burns away So if your warning lights are flashing, son, don’t duct tape over red A shutdown done with dignity beats catastrophic dead Final Chorus So here’s to VAX and excavator, DOS and dozer steel Mainframe and Massey Ferguson and every turning wheel To the farmers and mechanics and the coders in the cold Keeping busted systems limping long enough to make it home I’m a heavy equipment operator, north country born and raised Trying to keep the lights on through another freeze-thaw phase And when this whole rig finally throws a rod beside the river Just plant me near the gravel pit where the banjo shakes the timbers [Banjo solo over idle diesel and modem handshake noises.]
