Darnit. I need a better pony name for The Big Brick Construction company · 12:48am Jul 6th, 2018
My problem for The Big Brick Construction and Reconstruction Specialists is that it turns into TBBCRS, and that's not very punny. So let me toss this out here (eww!) and see what kind of ideas it spawns. From Farmer Bruener Has Some Ponies, which is up to about Chapter 11. If I get a really good idea, I'll post a snippet later tonight from the part where the displaced residents of Ponyville meet the Fred Felts family (Name of Topeka's most annoying family redacted for obvious lawsuit reasons).
- - - - ⧖ - - - -
Time: 3:45 P.M. Central Standard Time, Saturday June 20, 2015
Location: The Bruener Farm, Randolph KS
- - - - ⧖ - - - -
General Gregory Hackmore was supposed to be in command of the situation.
The problem was to define the situation, even while he was at the situation.
Technically, it was an alien invasion. If that was the extent of the issue, the solution would have been relatively easy. He had a division of soldiers with helicopters and armored vehicles about forty to fifty minutes away, on a good day. Hell, in extreme circumstances, one of the HIMARS units that had been prepositioned north of their usual areas could put artillery on anything he could see in less than two minutes.
Even the Chair Force wanted to get in on the action, and if they had their way, B-52s and Strike Eagles would be orbiting overhead 24/7, waiting for bombing missions. The only thing keeping the Navy’s thumb out of the pie was the fact they were in Kansas, and as such, a carrier strike force would have a slight issue getting near enough to do any striking.
Thankfully, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had decided to centralize decision making for the situation, focusing on the commanding officer at the site, which was a good euphemism for ‘Hackmore hasn’t screwed anything up yet. Let him take the blame if anything explodes.’ Sink or swim, here’s your anvil.
‘Trust but verify oh God yes verify’ was the watchword of this strange invasion.
The HIMARS units had been informed with extreme intensity that there would not be any accidental firings, and that unless he personally was on the phone with the artillery coordinator, the missile pods and transport units would remain cold, inert, and turned off under camouflage netting or heads would roll.
About twenty metric tons of paper were in the process of being filed, an Airborne unit at Fort Riley was being kept on ten minute alert status, and the armored maintenance division was working double-overtime to bring all vehicles up to snuff just in case of emergency.
And an emergency had been defined as ‘What the general in charge says, not anybody lower on the food chain and particularly not any nitwit in the five-sided puzzle palace who thought it was perfectly fine to jump the chain of command for their particular critical important bit of trivia.
It was an example of what kind of power General Hackmore had been granted. Even with all that supposed power, it had still taken eight hours to get four blithering tanks the relatively short distance from there to here, due to traffic tie-ups, accidents, one insanely frustrating truck running out of fuel due to a malfunctioning gauge, and rules defining just how long a driver could be behind the wheel before being swapped out by another soldier who needed to be delivered through the same disaster zone.
If the balloon had ever gone up in Germany, this kind of cluster-fuck would be the norm. Thank God for Reagan.
He had relocated his informal command post to the Bruener family farm, not strictly because of Jonagold’s beautiful wife Maria, but because it provided a good view of the proposed tank deployment. Besides, Maria had brought out iced tea to the three of them, and stayed behind to watch the slow progress of the tank transporter as they unloaded Four-Two at the top of the hill.
“Good thing they’re finally here,” said Jon with just the slightest snark in his voice. “We crunchies were always told the tread-heads would be there when we didn’t need them, and would be called away the moment we did. I was starting to think they wouldn’t show until the ponies go home on Monday.”
“My S-3 and S-4 are going to get raked through the coals until they’re done on both sides,” said General Hackmore. “The longer I wait to roast them, the more self-roasting they’re doing to themselves, so it can wait.” He took a sip of iced tea and nibbled on his bottom lip for a time until the question he was suppressing leaked out. “You don’t think I can get one of the Equestrians to drop by my house and say hello to my granddaughter, do you? She’s been bugging me something fierce.”
“Not a problem, General. I’ll talk to Hardhooves and see if Flash Sentry is available.” Jon unlocked his new iPhone and checked the contacts list. “It’s a lot easier since one of your soldiers picked up a dozen pay-as-you-go phones from Verizon. The ponies can flip them open to answer and most of them can dial the address book with hooves.”
“It’s a lot easier than trying to tie into their network,” mused Hackmore. “There’s nothing in those communicators they use other than a few crystals. We can’t detect any electromagnetic flux from their operation at all, but they do have range issues.” He craned his neck and got out his own phone in order to enter the pony commander’s number while Jon waited for the ringing to finish. It only took a few minutes to set up the ‘public affairs visitation’ for Flash, which sounded like Hardhooves was grateful to get the pegasus out of his hair for a while.
“Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic,” said Maria, who had been fairly quiet until then. As a practicing psychologist, she listened a lot more than she talked anyway, and still had the Portuguese instincts of her childhood. “I wonder if the opposite is true. The ponies talk about their princess raising and lowering the sun and moon, after all. If those are just some sort of technological… or magicological—”
“Thaumaturgical,” said Hackmore. “It’s the latest buzzword on all of my teleconferences. The wonderful boffins of the Army think the secret to mastering Equestrian magic is to use as many large, indescribable words as they can. There’s more useless technobabble running around behind the scenes than you can shake a stick at.”
The conversation continued as the tank at the top of the hill was nudged into position and the tank transport moved away. They were just getting into interesting speculation as to how long it would have to remain in place when several ponies came around the corner of the house in their direction.
“Ah, Mister Bruener,” said the smallest of the bunch, a brick-red earth pony who had to stand up on his hind legs in order to shake Jon’s hand. “My name is Big Brick, of the Big Brick Construction Company.”
“You’re Big Brick?” Jon’s nose twitched with the effort of restraining a laugh at the mental image that immediately sprung to mind, even though the smaller pony still had a few strands of grey hair in his mane and the image of a square brick on his rump.
“Yes, sir. And this is my son, Little Brick.” Jon shook hooves with the far larger earth pony, who came up to Jon’s nose easily, and did quite a bit to wipe away the mental image that his father had conjured up.
“And my accountant, Double Billing, and my work crew supervisor, Cost Overrun.”
Jon found himself shaking hands… well, hooves with a greasy-looking unicorn and a somewhat mottled pegasus who looked as if he had not taken a bath since ever. “Good morning, gentlemen. Or ladies,” he added, since trying to estimate gender on furry quadrupeds was a work in progress. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s what we can do for you,” said the small earth pony with a disturbingly happy smile that Jon had last seen on the person who replaced his water heater. “You see, our company, the Big Brick Construction and Reconstruction Specialists, has quite a reputation around Ponyville as the place to go for all of your structural needs. We specialise in erecting structures all across the tri-county valley, and although we do some of the finest commercial erections in all of Equestria, we’re also the ponies that others come to whenever they find themselves in dire need of our other, more personal services.”
That mental image was getting very difficult to ignore, but Jon nodded anyway and asked, “So what servicing do you think I need?”
“For that, I’m going to refer you to my lovely wife,” said Big Brick.
“Right, right,” said Double Billing in a disturbingly sexy female voice, moving the toothpick she was chewing on to the other side of her mouth and floating a clipboard up in her magic. The sheet of copy paper it held was covered in squiggly Equestrian symbols including a line of numbers to one side which almost looked normal if squinted at and one were to ignore the comma placement. “Youse has a problem wit your road, sir. Seems one of our boys found a culvert at the bottom of that first hill thats got all kinds of rust eatin’ away at it since the cathodic protection failed, an’ the first big load it has to take is gonna make it buckle like Overrun here facing a raincloud.”
“The road’s gonna break, dude,” said Overrun, continuing to stare in fascination at the tank transporter starting to move down the hill. “That’s one big chunk of metal. Gonna break it like a toothpick.”
“Yeah, you should probably go wave that truck off,” said Double Billing. “Else they’re going to rupture the existing culvert and dat’ll cost extra to fix.”
“Wait a second,” said Jon. “That’s a county road, not mine. And they put that culvert in just over ten years ago. It’s not old enough to fail yet.”
He took a glance at the huge truck and the squat main battle tank it was carrying. Undoubtedly, there was a lot more weight involved than semi trucks carrying normal seed deliveries for Bruener Seeds’ storage facility, but the county had been very insistent about putting the heavy culvert in when he became a seed representative and suspected that the increased mil levy his farmstead had endured immediately afterward was an attempt to make up for the expense.
“Maybe I should—” started General Hackmore just as the truck reached the bottom of the hill and the driver shifted into a lower gear to take advantage of engine braking.
The road took care of that first.
They were just far enough away that the sight of the rear dual wheels breaking through the gravel surface of the road was visible before the heavy ‘crack’ of breaking steel echoed around the farmstead. The heavy transporter vehicle, which fortunately had been traveling at a very low velocity, lurched and appeared to break in half, with the truck cab sticking up in the air and the front wheels off the ground by a considerable margin. To the rear, the hefty main battle tank did not shift off its platform, but the weight drove the fifth-wheel coupling straight down into the resulting hole, and most certainly bent the hell out of the transporter’s whole structure.
“Yeah, dat’s gonna cost extra,” said Double Billing, making an entry on her clipboard even as the crunching sounds of the wreck were dying down. “We’s gonna have to rent some equipment in town, get a couple of you humans to drive it here, and work thru’ da night to get ever’thing done afore we’re gone Monday. We’s talking about serious overtime. Mebbie even have to get a crane to lift dat huge hunk of metal off the back.”
“That ‘huge hunk of metal’ can drive itself out,” said General Hackmore, who looked as if he wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose but instead turned the gesture into a brief scratch before getting out his SMEPED to take a picture. “I’ll get a Hercules down from the Fort to pull our transporter out. Sorry to have busted your road, Mister Bruener.”
“It’s the county’s road,” said Jon. He took a picture with his phone and opened up Facebook. “I don’t think there’s any need for your services in this regard, Big Brick. I’ll bet the county is out here in a few hours, even if it is Saturday. Sorry about that.”
The smallish earth pony made a throwaway gesture with one hoof. “Pshaw, not a problem, sir. It’ll do the boys good to watch how the humans rebuild roads. It’s just…” Big Brick moved closer and raised his voice. “Hey! Overrun! Stop gawking and go help dat lady out of the truck! An’ the rest of youse, go see what they need done. We can call it a free estimate. Now git!”
Once the other three ponies were on their way, Big Brick cleared his throat and asked, “So, as I was saying. My boys, they get a little antsy without nuttin’ to do. I means around Ponyville, there’s always something blowin’ up or like that, and den when Princess Twilight’s crystal castle popped up witout even a terlit in it, I thoughts we were set for a couple years. Soo…” The short pony looked in both directions. “You got anything I could use to keep ‘em busy until Monday? I’ll get’cha a ten percent discount.”
“There’s some things I’ve been bugging my husband to do about the old house, and our house too,” said Maria unexpectedly while Jon was distracted by the way Cost Overrun was flying the transporter driver to the ground. “Since the Army has their mobile kitchen setup now, the ponies won’t need it for a lunch stop. Let me go get my list.”
Jon’s wife vanished inside the house, and Jon could feel several thousand dollars of his own begin a vanishing act out of his wallet.
“Just… try to keep it under control,” he urged.
Big Brick grinned. “Don’t worry. We’ve got this.”
First thing that pops into my head is Advanced Construction Demolition Company, Inc. But that's kinda meh.
Hopefully someone can do better.
Something unrelated to your question but I did notice an error in this passage. Steel culverts don't "crack". The steel that they are made from is too soft for that. They will however collapse if overloaded resulting in a nice "crunch". Also nowadays larger culverts (like the kind large enough to half swallow a truck) are usually concrete culverts and concrete does "crack". If you are looking for a reason for a concrete culvert to prematurely fail it could have been made of substandard concrete and started to erode.
I’ve got a couple:
4895590
Their work is Done Dirt Cheap™, and their wrecking balls are the biggest of them all!
The Better Big Brick Builder Buff Brothers
4895595
Actual customer review:
"Five Stars! I was Thunderstuck by the quality of their work!" :)
How about the
Peerless
Union of
Bricklaying
Equestrian
Specialists
?
Or just the Society Of Bricklaying Specials? If you need bricks, you can always rely on these SOBs!
Or maybe the...
Society of
Housemaking and
Innovation
Through
Bricklaying,
Renovation,
Industry,
Creativity and
Kinetic
Science
Sorry that's all I've got now. I know some of these aren't practical, but I can appreciate a funny acronym as much as the next guy.
Long Lasting Construction LLC
Whole load of old brickwork locations where I live, but the one that might fit best for Ponyville nearby is Whinny Hill Brickworks. Home of REDAC and NORI.
One of those classes of bricks needs hammer action on tungsten carbide drills to penetrate.
NORI Blue is even tougher. Well worth the name of being related to anything based in Ponyville.
Then again, Im not sure what the construction details were of the sewer culvert that collapsed in Manchester some years ago, underneath a double decker bus as it set off from the busstop. Something about that little extra torque from accelerating, or just the bus stopping ther long enough for the course to flex enough out of alignment? But a fully loaded 18 wheeler, all up, weighs as much as an MBT, but that has much lower pressure due to tread spread, so if they were using rubber cleats like the Hymacs, it would be safer to drive the tanks locally?
How heavy would the traction unit itself be, given you got haul arm 20 ton skip wagons?
Best recovery I saw was a few years ago, a rig dropped fully sideways into teh stream by the side of the road, two heavy recovery trucks came out, parked on the other side of the road, and laced up with hauling and restraining cables and dragged the near full of grain truck up and sideways out of the stream bed. that is up the vertical retaining wall at least 4 foot. Fortunately the hauler and his family got out uninjured.
Not the worst name around at all, I wouldve thought that was Flim and Flams cousins. Hackit, Bodgett and Scarper.
4895629 Our old building on main street (the old post office) was made out of penitentiary brick, which will blunt a diamond drill. Worse than Sweetie Belle's muffins. And I got to run wires through it. Yeah, it took work. We won't go into the four layers of false ceilings and the pigeon poop.
Tank ground pressure as you noted is quite a bit less than semi pressure, and a lot less than a tank transporter. (checks) 15psi M1A2 vs 80 to 800 psi for a semi without/with load (estimated), and the tank pressure is in a contiguous pair of stripes instead of 18x points.
4895591 Steel culverts fail (I'll change 'crack' to 'crunch' by the way) on a fair ratio as compared to concrete ones. Trust me, I've been working around them for 30 years now. The key is cathodic protection and proper installation for the steel ones, without which they can fail dramatically in a little over ten years, and proper concrete mixture and curing for the concrete ones, without which they can *abruptly* fail in as little as 2-5 years. Both, when put in right and maintained, will outlive us all.
4895624 In Ponyville? An ice sculpture can be considered a long-lasting construct. Most buildings last less time than Applejack's barn.
Big Brick Construction and Reconstructin Specialists
BB ConRecSpec
Brick Associates Demolitions Excavations aNd Developments (BADEND)
Brick & Associates Demoltions Architecture & Structured Systems (BADASS)
Big Brick's Breakers And Positive Reconstruction, Assembly, Transformation, Installation, & Nicetization, Guaranteed
BBB A+ RATING!
4895655 Big Brick Brothers And Partners. Reconstruction, Assembly, Transformations, Installations, and Niceization Guaranteed. Hm, has a zing to it.
"So, what's your brother's name, Big Brick?"
"Ash Hole, but we don't talk about him much. He mostly does chimneys."
4895660
Well, breakers was because you gotta demolish what's left of the wreckage to rebuild. He'd be very good about that after being the pony to see in Ponyville when a monster only smashes half a house but the rest isn't structurally sound enough to attach bits back on to.
And once I saw the third B, the rest just kind of wrote itself, where before I was trying to think of something using a single B.
4895642
Of course steel culverts fail, I never meant to imply that they wouldn't. What I was attempting to point out was two fold.
1. The failure mode of steel culverts is usually a ductile failure not an brittle failure.
2. At least in the municipality where I work once you get above a 4' diameter culvert you get a much better bang for your buck to use concrete.
(Although now that I think about it that might at least partly be because the next town over has a plant that makes them so we don't have to pay for shipping.)
4895662 Yeah, but using 'Brothers' lets me set up the second joke.
“Ah, Mister Bruener,” said the smallest of the bunch, a brick-red earth pony who had to stand up on his hind legs in order to shake Jon’s hand. “My name is Big Brick, of the Big Brick Brothers And Partners, Reconstruction, Assembly, Transformations, Installations, and Niceization Guaranteed⁽*⁾ company.”
(*) Contact Midknight Defender for franchise opportunities. Become a Big Brick today!
“You’re Big Brick?” Jon’s nose twitched with the effort of restraining a laugh at the mental image that immediately sprung to mind, even though the smaller pony still had a few strands of grey hair in his mane and the image of a square brick on his rump.
“Yes, sir. And this is my son, Little Brick.” Jon shook hooves with the far larger earth pony, who came up to Jon’s nose easily, and did quite a bit to wipe away the mental image that his father had conjured up. After the vigorous hoofshake, Jon’s eyes drifted to the other two ponies on the porch.
“So these must be your brothers, then?”
“Naaa,” said Big Brick with a disparaging flick of the wrist. “Ash Hole made it out of Ponyville during the evacuation. These are my accountant, Double Billing, and my work crew supervisor, Cost Overrun.”
4895676
Hehe.
But now I feel bad for his nephew, Big Ash. After all, he wants to build blast furnaces and industrial complexes, not chimneys!
4895672 Part of it is the surrounding medium. This is a gravel road in a rural area. Most steel culverts aren't even capped with concrete flow diverters. *Inside* town, you're dealing with concrete pavement/curbs/etc. and for that, concrete to concrete works best. You want lower maintenance (so no yearly cathodic protection refreshes, like Watershed dams) and longer life (which since you're in a town, you have more control over quality, or so it is supposed to be).
This many years after concrete was invented and we *still* have companies in the area who can't pour a concrete water storage facility for cattle that lasts more than five years. (yes, dealt with that a few weeks ago)
4895683
You mean this many millennia, right?
The ancient Romans were building things with concrete as early as 1300 BCE
Some of those works are still intact...
Well, -ish.
:thisisyourmomentofnerdfortheday:
How about a pair of sisters:
Cinder Block
Joist Timber
4895698
We need more of Celestia saying "In my day... and it's still my day!"
4895683
You could say best animal water trough Ive seen locally is a bathtub with a toilet float valve bolted into the overflow. Mainly because theyre so used to useing the cast iron ones as replacements when the stone troughs got removed or stolen.
My mediocre suggestion(s):
Acme Brick Services or Absolutely Best Services (ABS)
Brick's Absolutely Laudable Deals on Erections, Reclamations, Demolitions, Additions, Shacks, and Dungeons (BALDERDASH)