Darn Good Job

Due to the nature of my job, I am often travelling from one city to another.  Sometimes I find myself in the stallion city, other times I’m on the island city.  During my travel from city to city, I often notice tons of “should-not-be” situations that are being tolerated or ignored.  I sometimes wonder if this is the result of the type of people recruited to do that specific task.

One specific example is a traffic light along the southern reclamation road that stops functioning after nine o’ clock in the evening.  For reasons only the traffic light programmer could fathom, the traffic lights pause at yellow along the main thoroughfare while the light at the intersecting by-road is stuck at red.  Motorists coming from the by-road late at night, who aren’t familiar with this bang up job, will have to wait until five in the morning for the lights to turn green.  Everyone knows that these lights should be blinking and not stationary if they were to be used as ‘proceed with caution’ lights instead of the usual traffic cycle of red, yellow and green.  Everytime I pass this area, I often find myself wondering if the programmer of the traffic lights looked up at his handywork and say to himself, “Darn, I did a good job today!”

Another example is the multiple patch jobs all over the main city.  I’m guessing the engineers tasked to oversee the patching of potholes all over the city are frustrated motocross rides.  For some reason, their idea of a good patch up job is making anthill-sized asphalt patches on top of potholes.  Is it too much to ask to make the patch level with the existing road?  This does pose a hazard to wannabe low-riders and amateur Evel Knievel wannabes.  I guess the road engineers and the people they hire to do this piss-poor patch work pat themselves at the back and say to themselves, “We did a darn good job today!”

I would also like to commend the traffic enforcer along the wireless section of the kapitolyo city.  This guy stands right under a ‘no stopping anytime’ sign everyday marvelling at the repair and maintenance work being done by the makeshift repair shop on all the trikes and mopeds parked under and within the enforcement area of the signage.  I pass this area often and I am amazed at the number of illiterate licensed scooter drivers who knowingly stop in the ‘no stopping zone’ to have their bikes repaired by the illegal repair shop.  And all this is going on under the watchful eye of the “traffic law enforcer.”  I am sure this guy goes home every night saying to himself, “I deserve my paycheck today because I did a darn good job!”

The island city has its share of eagle-eye traffic enforcers as well.  They are so quick to catch public and private vehicles who turn left on areas with almost invisible and intelligible ‘no left turn’ signages yet cannot seem to see red-plated vehicles turn left at the same junction. And to prove to their families that they are the good husbands they keep pretending to be, they rush home on their scooters and mopeds, driving against the flow of traffic to tell their wives, “Honey, I did a darn good job today!”

But I have to tip my hat to the engineers and workers who had the unenviable task of repairing the road at the reclaimed area at the north.  They saw the crock of a job done by their predecessors and said to themselves, we can do a much better job than this.  And indeed they did.  What once was an unsmooth stretch of road full of patch jobs and potholes is now an extremely wavy and unsmooth stretch of uneven road full of patch jobs and potholes.  I am so sure the dimwits from the public works department looked at each other, shook their hands and said to one another, “we did a darn good job today!”

And I look forward to how the kapitolyo city will figure out programming the multitude of newly installed traffic lights together with their old, failed to function properly traffic lights.  I mean, they couldn’t figure out how to work three lights, what more for five-lighted traffic lights?  Good luck and tell yourselves, that by wasting city funds on additional useless traffic lights, you did a darn good job!