city_workers raze start ripping up a street that didn't need any work at 6:38 in the morning. disappear for half the day. leave equipment sitting around unattended forever, blocking access to several driveways. it's good to know some things don't change. 161018 ... raze as far as i could tell, all they did today was periodically drive the digger around without ever using it, so it would sound like they were working. i can't even make this stuff up. 161019 ... raze now, instead of repairing any of the damage they've caused or repaving the street, they're tearing up our street a second time, even though they've replaced the pipes and there's no conceivable reason to redo what's already been done. they start before the sun comes up and don't stop until the sun goes down. they spend half the time banging and beeping while doing a whole lot of nothing, parking in people's driveways, dumping equipment on any front lawn they feel like using. it looks an awful lot like they're making up random things to do so they can create the illusion of serving whatever their purpose is supposed to be, though i'm hard pressed to come up with a reason for digging up our neighbour's front lawn and dumping the dirt back where it came from without doing anything in between to justify the lawn destruction. they're swell fellas. 161028 ... raze they're actually working now. well what do you know. 161104 ... raze they're still here. "attaboy, miguel!" one screamed at another the other day. at least most of us are allowed to park in our own driveways again. that's progress. 161121 ... raze i can't even tell anymore if they're working on the road or pretending to work on the road. beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. 161201 ... raze they put asphalt down today! it's the shoddiest-looking asphalt job i've ever seen in my life, but still. i almost fainted. 161201 ... raze and here i thought maybe that was just preliminary asphalt. nope. it's the finished product. it's the saddest looking "new" road i've ever seen. they did such a half-assed job, it's a few days old and already it's starting to degrade from the little bit of use it's seen. but it means they're done. they're gone. after two months of stretching out a job they probably could have finished in less than half that time, we finally get peace and the uninterrupted use of our street back. so i'll take it. farewell, d'amore construction, you useless sacks of overpaid shit. 161205 ... raze ... and they're back, this time to rip up our street lights and put in new ones. WE DON'T NEED NEW STREET LIGHTS. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH OUR EXISTING STREET LIGHTS. THE STREET LIGHTS HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE NEW WATER MAINS WE ALSO DIDN'T NEED. just another way to fabricate a job and then spend ten times longer finishing it than anyone competent would. 170308 ... e_o_i "just another way to fabricate a job and then spend ten times longer finishing it than anyone competent would." - hey, hey, hey, I do that regularly. I just don't get paid well. :) 170309 ... raze but you don't show up, work for all of twenty minutes, and then say, "eh, i've done enough," and leave for the day. which is what they did today. and even if you did do that, i still say you rock, while these guys don't even know how to roll. that's right! they don't even make good human boulders! 170309 ... e_o_i Mais je comprends cela. Like, why pile snow in FRONT of driveways? Pourquoi? ...It's the people who are giving them the orders who are corrupt and incompetent, if Montreal is any indication. 170309 ... e_o_i Oops, sorry, I didn't see you'd already answered! I do on occasion show up for work, put in exactly nine and a half hours, then decide I've had enough and waste time on blather instead of finishing the "student follow-ups". (I should go, I can finish that stuff tomorrow, except the drunk_philosophy dude outside keeps insulting random passerby for being either ignorantly religious or gay. But he seems to have stopped now, so I can go without fighting the urge to tell him something completely and utterly random, e.g., "Sir, the meaning of life is inscribed on my forearm in Sanskrit, and I'll have you know that some of my most cherished prepositional phrases are completely and utterly homosexual. And I love them very much. So please remove your antennae and replace them with requests for probability tutoring (we can probably help you).") 170309 ... raze i think you should say that to him, verbatim, and have someone film it, so i can watch and applaud. because that would be amazing. 170309 ... raze today's itinerary: - move random bits of snow around with rakes, but don't do enough to clear it away - drive trucks and caterpillars around aimlessly, beeping without purpose - dump dirt on top of pockets of snow that are nowhere near streetlights - watch more snow fall and cover the dirt, effectively negating the "work" you just did, whatever the point of dumping a bunch of dirt on top of the snow was - leave 170313 ... unhinged ugh 170313 ... raze the other day they were driving around ticketing cars that were parked on the street, apparently because they're doing "road repair" and street parking isn't allowed. here's the thing. there's no road repair being done. they haven't done any work on the road since december. there is no more work to be done on the road. they're not even working on those streetlights, or dumping dirt on snow in random places, or anything. their signs and things are still here to make it look like there's work being done, i guess so they can continue to collect a paycheque for doing nothing, but aside from the car giving people tickets for an invented reason, they haven't been here since the middle of the week. i'd really like to know how that's legal. 170317 ... raze they seem to be finished. the new streetlights are garbage. they barely throw off any light at all. they never bothered removing any of the old, better streetlights, either. the new ones stand beside the old ones. it looks dumb. it is dumb. the only thing i can figure: it's a way for the city to save a bit of money by giving us less light at night. thanks, city. you're number one. the end. hopefully. 170328 ... raze the saga continues. now they've returned to remove those old streetlights, and also to take care of the landscaping they "didn't have time to do" at any point over the past six months. i guess it'll be nice not to have a half-bald front lawn anymore. they worked yesterday but not today. it had nothing to do with the weather. it was a gorgeous day. i imagine working one day a week will be their new thing. another way to stretch out a job that shouldn't have taken anywhere near the half-year it's been so far. 170411 ... raze they came back on friday, making it a two-day work week. six guys ripping up what was left of our grass. or i should say, one or two of them were doing the actual work. the others stood around doing nothing, shooting the shit. at one point our landlord walked over and told them how he thought they should plant the new grass. after he walked away and was out of earshot one guy said, "who the fuck does he think he is telling us how to do our fuckin' job? he's not our fuckin' foreman. fuck him." they worked for about twenty minutes. then they sat on our porch, took turns cutting loud farts, and discussed the smell of said farts. they worked for another twenty minutes or so when they were out of gas. then they decided they'd worked long enough, called it a day, and left behind the spent containers they'd been drinking out of. 170415 ... raze yesterday was "removing the old streetlights day", which mostly involved them standing around and talking while doing nothing. every once in a while someone moved a tiny amount of dirt around with a shovel. today is "planting new grass" day, which doesn't involve planting grass at all. what it involves is throwing a street sign into someone's dirt, picking it up and moving it across the street, waving a broom around without using it, and then pushing a device that's supposed to turn the soil one inch forward before stopping and talking some more while doing nothing. an inch of movement takes a lot out of you, y'see. at this rate they'll be here fabricating work that isn't work and getting paid for it until everyone who lives on this street is dead. 170419 ... raze you're not gonna believe this, but they're actually putting down sod today. when i looked out the window and saw it happening, i just about soiled myself. geddit? do ya geddit? 170424 ... raze they're still working on one of the streets on this block. in the middle of may. as part of a job they started last october. and they're still taking their sweet time, nowhere near finished as far as i can tell. a storm is kicking up as i type this. i hope they all get struck by lightning. 170516 ... raze (for the record, i don't really wish death on them. it's just ... come on. do what you came to do and go. enough is enough.) 170516 ... raze when it rains a little bit in the morning and is a beautiful day otherwise, they use it as an excuse to take the whole day off. because, you know, it WAS raining for a few minutes there. i'm torn between enjoying the lack of noise and thinking that's one of the most ridiculous things i've ever been witness to. 170517 ... raze now they've decided the neighbour's curb needs to be redone for some arbitrary reason. this tells me three things: 1. it wasn't important enough to do the job right the first time. 2. it wasn't important enough to fix this nonexistent problem in anything like a timely fashion. they finished work on the curbs HALF A YEAR AGO. 3. they're still just as useless as ever. yesterday a guy worked on the curb for ten minutes, left for four hours, came back, did another fifteen or twenty minutes of work before leaving again, and didn't come back. how much you wanna bet he got paid for the full day? 170601 ... raze their explanation for the work they're redoing on that curb, robbing vanessa of access to her own driveway: they "broke something underground". they haven't done a lick of work underground. 170603 ... raze now they're doing "road resurfacing", on a road that doesn't need any work at all. apparently their idea of resurfacing involves driving their machinery back and forth over said road without actually doing anything to it. according to their own literature, they were supposed to do this last month and it's a job that should only take two days. how much you want to bet they'll be here the rest of the year? it never ends. 170612 ... raze right. two wagers then. i need to keep track of these theoretical bets. 170612 ... raze at least i've learned something here: road resurfacing involves having five guys stand around a truck parked in the middle of an adjacent street, doing fuck all, watching while others do the supposed work. again, it must be nice to work for d'amore construction. you get paid just for existing. 170612 ... raze they actually worked. they actually put asphalt down. i feel faint. 170613 ... raze (of course, it was a different company that handled this part of the job. but still. the shock, she is palpable.) 170613 ... raze they're coming back to perform "sanitary sewer fog testing". they pump fog into our sewers, take over the street again, and it's our job to determine whether or not any of the fog makes its way into our homes, documenting its location. here's the thing. the notice said they would be here from august 10th to the 24th. on the back of this same notice, there's an FAQ section. one of the questions is, "how long does the testing take?" the answer: twenty minutes. it seems pretty clear to me. they've managed to drag out a job that can be done in a day over two weeks, and they're not even trying to hide it. i bet they don't show up at all until the 24th, getting paid for fourteen days of work when they're present for just one. there's been no sign of them at all yet. so there you go. 170812 ... unhinged ugh ugh 170814 ... raze good god. reading this again is ... something. for the rest of my life, the sound of a back-up beeper will make me want to hit something. it's nice to have peace and quiet around here. relatively speaking. 210620 ... raze their new thing is killing trees that were doing just fine before they showed up. this way they can invent some bullshit to justify their grossly inflated paycheques and claim they're "working" when all they're doing is murdering living things at random. i'd like to cut their fucking arms off with a chainsaw and say, "how do *you* like it?" but that would be illegal. so i tell them to go fuck themselves and hope they can hear me. i hope they get hemorrhoids that are so painful they find themselves wishing for death while they're shitting out sandpaper and blood. i hope the trees they've killed and the ones they haven't killed yet terrorize them in their dreams. other than that, i wish them well. 211021 ... tender_square wouldn't it be the sweetest karmic justice ever if the only toilet paper the worker's could use to wipe their hemorrhoid-ridden asses was made from the very trees they cut down, just the roughest ply imaginable, which would paper cut their buttholes for eternity? 211021 ... raze i'll have you know that just made me spit invisible soda all over my laptop screen. i regret nothing (which is easy for me to say when there's no mess to clean up, but still). 211021 ... raze "we're here to trim your tree," one of them says. we don't have a tree. we have a fucking sapling. the one they want is our neighbour's tree. the neighbour didn't ask for it to be trimmed, because it doesn't need trimming. that doesn't matter. these morons have spent the morning and afternoon cutting branches off of random trees in the area, alternating between "working" for two minutes and squinting at the sky for half-hour blocks of braindead wonderment, searching for something else to mutilate. i'll say it again: i can't even make this shit up. 211026 ... raze they've been sitting in front of the same house and pretending to dismember the same tree for the last five hours. i have to hand it to them. their ability to conjure paid work out of nothing is pretty impressive. 211028 ... raze they keep teaching me new things all the time. their latest lesson: you need to block off a street you're not doing any work on in order to destroy an alley you've already torn up and rebuilt about ten times for no good reason. 211207 ... nr the ones at my building are drilling right now, which is soft music compared to last year when there were four of them jackhammering concrete right outside my window. i thought i'd known what noise was until i experienced that. 211207 ... raze they were in the park collecting tree branches the wind had torn loose. four trucks drove through the path (because walking is hard), stopping every once in a while to gather twigs and boughs, tossing them into the cargo bed in such a sloppy way that at least half of what they picked up found its way back onto the path before they were gone. 211216 ... raze they claim they're trimming trees that could be "power outage risks". i saw them disfiguring one on niagara today. it was nowhere near any power lines. there has to be something better they can do to make themselves seem necessary to the taxpayers who despise them. 220203 ... raze after all the snow we got last night and the night before, they didn't bother to plow the path in the park. wait. scratch that. they plowed one section that constitutes about a twentieth of the total paved area before abandoning the job. when a city worker with a snowblower was asked what the deal was, he said they weren't sure where the path was, and they didn't want to damage the frozen grass, so they just left it ... after clearing enough of the path to see exactly where it was and what shape it took. after having cleared and salted that path hundreds if not thousands of times over a period of years. after probably being part of the crew that laid the very pavement they now claim is undetectable. they get better all the time. 220219 ... raze right now they're digging up perfectly good grass on ypres ... so they can replace it with new grass. how much you wanna bet they find a way to screw it up somehow, and the sod doesn't take? 220627 ... raze kill some more healthy trees that live behind my house and force me to listen to all your ugly sawing and grinding sounds first thing in the morning. why_not? it's not as if you useless, incompetent fucks know how to do anything else. 220630 ... raze for the last two hours and change, one dude has been getting paid a disgusting amount of money to stand on someone's front_porch and text. i should see if they're hiring. clearly you don't need to know how to do anything in order to work for the city. (then again, i don't own a cell phone. so i might not be the kind of man they're looking for.) 220725 ... raze massacring trees on a civic holiday just because they can. same as it ever was. 220801 ... raze on a day when it was raining, they were pretending to clean the path in the park, knowing whatever they did would be undone by the sky inside of an hour. now that there's snow everywhere with ice in its veins, it takes them a week to do anything at all, and it's as worthless as all the rest of their piss-poor craftsmanship. give me the money they get paid to do nothing all day, and i'll find a cure for cancer, or at_least make a few worthwhile discoveries while i fail. 240118 what's it to you? who go blather from