Pool Party - Spray paint and bushes

A couple weeks after we signed the pool contract, I came home to find a young guy lurking on my front lawn, tagging the grass with a can of spray paint. He tells me the pool company sent him to mark utility lines. Or maybe he was really a well-dressed, polite gang member whose gang symbols were short, multi-colored lines. Either way, there was celebration at the Sullivan house that night because of the spray paint all over our yard. Hopefully it meant a pool was imminent. Or maybe we were about to be in the middle of a gang war. Either way, out yard would soon be trashed.

A week later, there was still no pool, but miraculously the lines on the lawn had multiplied. More lines, more colors, going in more random directions. How many utilities could really be running from our house to the street? Cable, electric, water, sewer in blue, green, yellow, and red. But what's the story with all these other strange colors and shapes? What do purple circles represent? And was that an aquamarine rectangle?

 

In addition to the vagaries of utility lines, the other problem that was bugging me was a large bush in the middle of the spot where the pool was going to be built. This thing was at least eight feet tall and six across, so it was too huge for me to just transplant it with my little garden trowel. It might have been a magnolia or some other such Southern flowering shrub. It's impossible to keep the different types straight. Anyway, it was pretty and it had white flowers and it smelled good and it was healthy and hadn't done anything to me, so I wanted it protected.

I contacted a landscaper to come move it, but he never called me back. Plus, we were already spending a pantload of money on the pool, so spending more to move foliage felt extravagant. So every time I looked out in the yard, seeing that pretty, doomed bush made me sad. What would the pool guys do with it on digging day? Surely they wouldn't just run it over with the excavator, right? So, could they move it? I vowed to pester the construction team about it the moment they showed up at my house to install the pool. And I can do a lot of pestering.