VAX and Excavator

Heavy Equipment Operator

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