Thursday 4 January 2007

Controllers may be wonderful but Contractors.......?


Yesterday we were having trouble getting out of Long Road in Paignton. This was because the contractors who had set up the temp traffic lights at the road works had never driven a bus and had left us with just enough room to get though provided we drove at half a mile and hour and didn't mind getting 2 inches away from an oil drum with 100 pounds of concrete in it.


In the afternoon the controller in Paignton reported that the contractors had been contacted and the situation would be resolved.


To day at 12 moon I got to the lights and nothing had changed. (As in top photo.) So I stuck my head out of the window while waiting for the lights to change and explained the problem to the site foreman, a sympathetic sounding gentleman who promised to move the offending oil drum, which is holding up one of the traffic lights.


35 mins later I got back and the oil drum had been moved about 6 inches back and the barrier on the right had moved about the same back. A big help, two or 3 feet would have been better.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A few years ago I stuck my head out the window to ask the foreman of a job site a question. I was concerned as to whether or not we would need to reroute our buses, and I was going to call in the information to dispatch. By way of answering, he began shrieking curses at me. I thought about that for a minute and, being a fool, ran over about 50 or his stupid little orange cones, scattering them all over the street. I should have gotten in trouble for that. I wrote a fairly honest incident report and never heard anything about it. Not one of my prouder moments.

A year or so earlier that same foreman was in charge of a crew that was hired to dig a small trench in our bus yard. He spent the day shrieking curses at the drivers as we worked around his crew. We mostly ignored him and went about our business while he got red in the face and screamed his way up into the soprano range. All this over a one foot wide, six foot long trench in a corner of the yard.

Obviously, I have a temper myself. It takes a while for me to lose it. I guess I'm just glad I don't work for that guy.