<story><title>The Devil&apos;s Hair Dryer: Hell is other people, with leaf blowers (2016)</title><url>https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/11/the-case-against-neighbors-with-leaf-blowers/506324/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grawprog</author><text>As someone who has worked landscaping on commercial sites and large apartment buildings and been yelled at or treated like shit for using a leaf blower to do it. You go try raking a truck full of leaves without one, making sure you get every corner and crevice underneath bushes and back corners so you don&amp;#x27;t get yelled at by customers or the boss. Not that you don&amp;#x27;t have to rake it all after anyway into large tarps or garbage cans that you then drag and carry by hand. Now do this in pouring rain, or snow, or when the leaves are frozen.&lt;p&gt;Trust me it&amp;#x27;s not fun.&lt;p&gt;Now personally myself. I think it&amp;#x27;s stupid to remove leaves from a site rather than let them decay naturally and add their nutrients back into the soil. But when you&amp;#x27;re being paid to do something and you need to make money to keep living in a house. That leaf blower is really handy.</text></item><item><author>uptime</author><text>Sign me up for the blower hater brigade.  I can almost forgive these during leaf season.  I hate them being used in place of brooms for landscaping.&lt;p&gt;A ton of noise to move a very small mass of clippings, etc, creating a cloud for 30 minutes to do a less complete job, often just blowing it all into the street without concentrating it and picking it up.  Maddening.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bunderbunder</author><text>When I was younger, my mom had a house with a large house full of oak trees.&lt;p&gt;We had to rake the leaves, because, if they were allowed to decay on the ground, it would kill most the other plants.&lt;p&gt;There was a leaf blower, but we didn&amp;#x27;t use it for long - personally, I thought the rakes got the job done more quickly and thoroughly, even with that obnoxiously large yard. But then, I suppose I wasn&amp;#x27;t doing it professionally. Maybe with practice I&amp;#x27;d have gotten better at it. The leaf blower was new; rakes are something I grew up with.&lt;p&gt;It was certainly more work to use a rake. I see that as an upside, though - it&amp;#x27;s always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place. Again, though, that&amp;#x27;s personal use, not professional.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Devil&apos;s Hair Dryer: Hell is other people, with leaf blowers (2016)</title><url>https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/11/the-case-against-neighbors-with-leaf-blowers/506324/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grawprog</author><text>As someone who has worked landscaping on commercial sites and large apartment buildings and been yelled at or treated like shit for using a leaf blower to do it. You go try raking a truck full of leaves without one, making sure you get every corner and crevice underneath bushes and back corners so you don&amp;#x27;t get yelled at by customers or the boss. Not that you don&amp;#x27;t have to rake it all after anyway into large tarps or garbage cans that you then drag and carry by hand. Now do this in pouring rain, or snow, or when the leaves are frozen.&lt;p&gt;Trust me it&amp;#x27;s not fun.&lt;p&gt;Now personally myself. I think it&amp;#x27;s stupid to remove leaves from a site rather than let them decay naturally and add their nutrients back into the soil. But when you&amp;#x27;re being paid to do something and you need to make money to keep living in a house. That leaf blower is really handy.</text></item><item><author>uptime</author><text>Sign me up for the blower hater brigade.  I can almost forgive these during leaf season.  I hate them being used in place of brooms for landscaping.&lt;p&gt;A ton of noise to move a very small mass of clippings, etc, creating a cloud for 30 minutes to do a less complete job, often just blowing it all into the street without concentrating it and picking it up.  Maddening.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>everdrive</author><text>If it&amp;#x27;s any consolation, I think we all agree this is a general human problem instead of a problem with the men doing the labor. Why does the company require this service? Why do customers request it? How can people think a few leaves are bad? Etc.&lt;p&gt;People have very strange ideas about landscaping, and that usually means bad things for the environment. eg: &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m a fully functioning adult, but I couldn&amp;#x27;t bear to see two kinds of grass so I had to cover the whole lawn with a neurotoxin.&amp;quot;</text></comment>