I had a 40 foot tall birch tree that was leaning precariously toward the power line that feeds our house. Every time we got a strong south wind I’d wonder if that would be the day we would be involuntarily removed from the grid. A tree service guy who was doing work for my neighbor took a quick look and quoted me $1500 to cut it down and dispose of it. (Not much less just to cut it down.)Short story, I used this pole saw to cut it down.Long story, I cut the tree off in many smaller sections and avoided hitting anything but dirt. But that included taking off some of the branches with me standing on the roof of my house.And THAT’s why you can’t handle it. My house is two stories tall which gave me the extra height I needed to get to the top branches but it’s also 15 feet away from the tree I was after. And although this polesaw only weighs 15 lbs or so, in the middle, by the time you extend the saw to it’s full length away from you while you grasp it toward the end, the laws of physics/engineering state that you won’t be strong enough to make the saw end go where you want it to cut.You know… kind of like the principle of the lever. Or maybe think of it as a really long torque wrench working against you. “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the world.” Give me a pole saw long enough and although I can easily hold it from the middle, if I hold it from the end I’m gonna have a problem.So maybe you can do it. But you have to be tricky. When I was still working from the ground, I planted the handle end against a structure and with it braced there, held onto it the pole and walked it back until it was upright. When it’s standing straight up it doesn’t seem as heavy (no leverage working against you) but you still have to fight it to keep it there like a guy trying to keep plates on a pole spinning. From the upright position your next challenge is to slowly lower the blade end and let it come to rest against the branch you are after. But the more you leave vertical the heavier it seems to get. So you may miss the branch and be faced with trying to slow down (good luck!) a rapidly descending and increasingly heavy sword of death flying toward whatever happens to be underneath it.From the roof I was unable to brace the pole when wielded it. And although I didn’t need to go as high, I had to go further out. That meant that I had to use a kind of javelin technique to get the blade to land on the target branch. I pointed the blade end where I needed it to be,holding it as far out as I was able to, and then thrust it quickly up and away from me and hoped it reached. I admit that I had to give up after one such session because my arms had turned to jello after many failed attempts. I tried again the next day after a rest and was successful.Your results may vary. For comparison, I am 6′ 1″ and 190 lbs(plus or minus). And although I’m not as strong as I used to be because … old age … I’m pretty sure that I’m still stronger than my much younger wife and son-in-law … combined.Oh .. and I also snapped one of the joints when the pole became trapped between the roof and a heavy branch that was accelerating earthward at 9.8 meters per second squared. Not the products fault. But the steel threads couldn’t handle the hit it took. So rejoined the surviving pieces and continued work with one fewer 98cm long section (I measured).