Today, six and a half months later, the low hanging tree limb (about a foot thick) that nearly every van and delivery truck would whack on its way down the street, finally got taken down.
After the branch had been cut down and the debris all piled up alongside the road, one of those giant claw loaders showed up, along with a big private contractor dump truck, followed by one of those ubiquitous DPW white pickups.I looked at the clock right after they had all assembled out there on the street, and it was right around 9 am, so I have to assume that they were all attending to their morning break.
You can't begrudge anyone their break time, that's for sure.
I'm all for it. You won't hear any complaints from me when it comes to break time.
When I went to school, I was really only there because I enjoyed recess so much... Every job I ever had, I was really only there for the breaks.
Of course, the difference between a DPW white truck and a Private Contractor white truck is that the driver of the private truck isn't prohibited by union rules from wiping down the windows, lights, and fenders of his truck during his morning break.I didn't even have to leave the house today to see the difference between a public service job and private sector job...
But I'm not trying to make the DPW guys look bad.
The driver of the private dump truck took care of that.
All things considered, of course, I'd much rather be one of the guys in the DPW white truck. Truly, I am much lazier and unproductive than any of them could ever possibly be.
About ten minutes into the break time, the two guys in the DPW white truck took off.
Then, a few minutes later, the loader got to work and scooped up all the branches and dropped them into the dump truck.It didn't take very long, and then they were gone.
I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong impression from all this, though. I've spun this all in one direction, but now I want you to see how easy it is to spin it in the other direction...
I have a very warm spot in my heart for the Worcester Department of Public Works. In the long term, there's no way that public service jobs such as those in the DPW could ever get filled with qualified people if the jobs paid garbage wages and lousy benefits. Through thick and thin, there's appearances (like the spin above) that are easy to expound upon, and then there are situations that take place such as last month's ice storm.
The performance of the city's services in cleaning up the mess that last month's ice storm produced is simply beyond reproach. Those DPW guys, when they were really needed, got the job done. And what truly amazes me today is that, right on the heels of that disaster, the city has also come around to handle an old work order like this one today... well, I'm definitely impressed.
I really didn't think that anything on this side of the city, the least affected part of Worcester in last month's ice storm, could be realistically attended to anytime before next spring. But the piles of branches elsewhere in this neighborhood have all disappeared in the past few days. And the closing of this particular work order, hardly something anybody could call a priority, was something I figured I'd just re-call on after the winter was over.
The moral of the story? It's easy to make someone "look bad" but it takes a bit more consideration and depth of reasoning to realize that, no matter how bad anything looks, we're all in this together.
DPW definitely gets a gold star for actual results over the past month.
(The City Council, meanwhile, continues to get a great big "F" with their sidewalk snow removal idiocy, along with so much of the other baloney they should be hanging their heads in shame over, such as the matters involved with my previous post...)
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