It’s spring, and all across America, municipal street departments are awakening from their long winter’s sleep (during which they considerately refrained from plowing out your street). Now they resume their fair-weather jobs of pretending to repair potholes, digging up the street in front of your house and then not coming back for two weeks, calling your wildflower plot “weeds” and mowing it, sending harassing letters to homeowners about truck tires in the alley which actually belong to the next-door neighbor, and just generally making themselves as welcome as that characteristic aroma of spring, the skunk cabbage.
So, now that they have rejoined the party, let the games begin!
This morning’s task, for our local street department, was to plant 3 itty-bitty ball-and-burlap bushes in front of the Public Library. It took seven (7) people with shovels, poking around in the dirt like they knew what they were doing, and four (4) people to stand there and watch them. But hey, let’s be fair. The city is an Equal Opportunity Employer–one of the people standing there holding a shovel was conspicuously female. Gloria Steinem would have been so proud. “We’ve cast off the chains of the Dead White European Male Oppressors and are free to join our brothers in the workplace! What time is lunch?”
(I will also be happy to extend the OP to include state highway departments. “Cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war…”)
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Eagle Grove just got its third traffic signal. That’s right – we now have three!!
The new light is at an intersection where I have never once, no, not once seen a car sitting at the stop sign waiting for an opportunity to cross.
It’s not a busy intersection. It’s not a school crossing, no parks nearby, just a bank drive-through, a church, a museum that’s only open twice a month and only in the summer, and a barber who’s only open half days.
We do not have a rush hour, not even a rush minute.
We didn’t need this light, and we especially didn’t need the light at an intersection where traffic flowed perfectly before the light was installed. Now we just pile up behind the light (waiting for no one) and then make people farther down the road wait till we pass by so they can move on.
Really, really stupid.
Wait. That was an insignificant rant. My gosh, when I think of some of the problems city-dwellers have to deal with.
Hmmmmm. [Emily Latella voice] Never mind. Back to folks with real problems.
No, actually it was a very good rant for someone with a name like “Auntie Pam”!
Now, if your moniker had been something like “BallsOfBrass” or “SavageVengeance” or “SuckMyTrailerHitchBaby”, THEN it would have been considered too tame.
I never sit at a red light at a lonely intersection without thinking of Susan Smith, the woman who claimed a carjacker made off with her car and her kids, remember her? She claimed the light at the cross street out in the boonies where she was waiting was red, but the cops told her, patiently, over and over again, that it’s one of those automatic signals, that when you drive up to it, it changes to green, so it couldn’t have been red.
After 9 days she recanted, and they went down to the lake and pulled her car out with the kids’ bodies inside.
Depressing thought. Well, it is the Pit. Have a nice day. I think. :rolleyes:
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Notthemama, I am a municipal employee, and I feel I must respond to your post. So I say to you…you go girl! You are so completely right on I can’t believe it.
The streets in my city positively suck goat balls. One morning last spring, I was on my way in to work. It was raining pretty hard. I was approaching a spot in the road where I knew there was a pothole, but I couldn’t see it, for the rain and the fact that it wasn’t quite all the way light outside yet. Well, I hit it. The next sound I heard was the unmistakable hisssssss of my tire going flat. I pulled into the parking lot of a party store on the corner, and discovered to my horror that nothing was wrong with my tire. It was my rim. It was broken. That crater in the street got two more victims while I was waiting for the tow truck.
Being the good municipal employee that I am, I graciously informed the other two people of exactly which department to call about the situation. No, not street maintainance. Call the Legal Department. They will reimburse you for any repair you have done as a result of that black hole in the road.
While I was in the Legal office filling out my own paperwork, they told me that at least a dozen people had called Street Maintainance about that particular pothole.
They did fill it in, but it didn’t do much good. All they did was throw a few fistfuls of asphalt down. In the rain. Into a huge pit that was full of water.
So, Notthemama, I do indeed feel your pain.
Cristi, Slayer of Peeps
I made my husband join a bridge club. He jumps next Tuesday.
Highway 99 leads south into Seattle. It’s in adequate repair in most places, but it’s always been a bit uneven running through Lynnwood. One section had these deep tire ruts that played hell with my car’s alignment.
They’ve been playing around with the highway for about a year now. They spent a week or so re-paving the section of road with tire ruts. Then they opened the section back up to traffic. But they were still digging up other parts of the road, so traffic along the newly re-paved bits was agonizingly slow. In three days, the tire ruts had reappeared. Worse than before. For the sake of my alignment, I take side streets until I get out of town.
They’re still working on the damn thing.
(Incidentally, Auntie, your city council may have approved a superfluous traffic light. But just think! From now on, they’ll have a bigger budget every year! Brand new cappuccino machines in city hall!)
Notthemama: You may use the phrase “to suck goat balls,” and any variation (i.e. “suck the balls of goats,” “suck really large goat balls,” “suck horned goat testicles,” and the like) any time you wish!
I was going to say that our street maintainance “sucks donkey dick,” but that one has been used rather a lot, so I decided to try something new. I also like the phrase “blows goats,” which I did see here on the SDMB, I believe in a long-ago post by Satan. “Sucks goat ass” works well, too.
Have fun!
Cristi, Slayer of Peeps
I made my husband join a bridge club. He jumps next Tuesday.
It’s Fiber-Mania here in the nation’s capital. Companies (not mine, for gosh sakes) are stripping the top layers of asphalt off the streets to lay dark fiber. The problem is that they’ve stripped off so much asphalt off of so many streets that the Mayor has placed a moratorium on further work until some of the damage is repaired.
They’re also due to rip up Ney York Ave again so they can repave it, even though it’s always perfectly fine before they rip it to shreds.
I’m so glad I don’t drive any more
–In high school, voted most likely to get stuck in a clarinet.
