Do Peons Work Here?

Unless you were living in a cave over the past year, you would clearly know that it’s election time.  Aside from the campaign posters and billboards that are being recklessly posted everywhere, the roads visible to every gullible voter are getting the royal treatment.  It is an ongoing, yet ‘unconfirmed’, rumor that massive road repairs are usually done towards election to try to get the sympathy votes from the denizens who were born yesterday.  It is also alleged, rumoured and ‘unconfirmed’ that these road repairs are done at these times to fill the campaign coffers of the different political parties.

I care not for these rumours as they do me nothing.  What gets my beef is the piss-poor quality of work that go into these projects.  It starts off with signages that mention the upcoming project in tiny fonts and is one paragraph long.  These signages are placed in areas where a motorist is expected to read the information while running at speeds slightly above (20kph higher) the allowed speed limit.  Even if they were to crawl to the actual speed limit, the information on the signage is so long, they’d only manage to read two lines of the ten line litany. 

Then you will have the deployment of ten to fifteen workers who will be tasked to assist the heavy equipment in tearing apart a portion of the road that is still in very good condition.  There must be a formula that only these project engineers are privy to because I can’t figure out the logic behind a ten man, only one shovel and pick for the entire group ratio.  How many hours a day do these workers actually spend shovelling if they had to share only one shovel?  Wouldn’t the roads be cleared faster if each of them had a shovel and a pick?  I guess standard operating procedures (SOP’s) force a reduction in the number of equipment purchased for the project.

And it is very interesting to note that these road repair projects were started during the rainy season.  Logically, it would’ve been best to strengthen the foundation of existing roads during summer.  Rains tend to wash away compacted soil or further dilute an already watered down concrete mixture.  Yet, there must be something to rainy seasons.  Where I live, they covered potholes and levelled roads using compacted soil during the rainy season.  Guess what?  It didn’t work!  Someone was probably dropped on their head as a child.

Speaking of being dropped on their head, I was told that there was going to be a roller coaster ride that will open in the Kapitolyo city in a couple of weeks.  I guess this means the construction work on the north reclamation road is almost done.  That strip of road will give Six Flag’s Magic Mountain a run for its money as being one of the scariest thrill rides on earth.

I am pretty sure the filing of candidacy certificates and the start of these road projects happening in sequence was purely coincidental.  As I said above, these are just rumors and are unconfirmed.  But what I can confirm is that engineers all over the island are cringing in their seats knowing that a group of people alleging to be their peers are responsible for the slap-shod work that is proliferating all around.  I mean, could you proudly call yourself an engineer and be classified as an equal to a “qualified” civil service passing, government employed engineer responsible for the worst decisions that cause severe inconvenience to every single citizen who uses the road?

I always wondered, as I go home to the stallion city every night, if the letters on that building to the right of the expressway mean, ‘do peons work here’?  Or is it, as a dear friend of mine pointed out, “daghan project, walay human”?