“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?” the officer asked my Father.
“Yea,” he says, “I had a glass of wine with my dinner. So what?”
“Woa,” the cop held up a hand. “I’m not mad at you, I just want you to know I can smell it.”
Oh,… OK.” my Father said with a shrug and a smile.
That night, my Father had been driving me somewhere I cant remember. (The above dialog is unnecessary to the story, but I love it too much to let go. My Dad rules.) We hit a pot hole big enough to damage the rim, and flatten the tire. He had seen it early enough to avoid it, but that would have meant driving his car and two children (my twelve year old sister was in the back seat) into oncoming traffic.
We pulled over to change the tire and that’s when the cop showed up. His badge said he was Portuguese, and that may be why he decided not to hassle either one of us over the wine breath, or why he tried to give us some advice on pot holes. According to him, if he made a report, my Father could be reimbursed for the rim damage if he submitted the receipts to city hall. Because, the damage was caused by an unkempt portion of city property.
The cop made the report. My Father submitted his receipt. The city never paid him back.
The clerk from city hall said, “If we paid you back, we would have to pay everybody.” Sad, true, and spoken by a brainwashed twat.
I live on the corner of a four way intersection of a child populated neighborhood without a stop sign, in a small New England city south of Boston popular for once being, “The Whaling City,” now only popular for being the pain in the ass on your way to Cape Cod. Even famous television chefs like Emeril Lagasse, and Anthony Bourdain keep their voices low when New Bedford must is mentioned between praise for Fall River and the Cape. The only people to truly show this city love anymore are the Portuguese. (Most of which are members of my family. Funny isn’t it? Wink, wink.)
The streets are narrow, overpopulated, hazardous gambits, that only the brave, the unaware, and the stupid are willing to face on a day to day basis. Most are one ways going in the wrong direction, the others, bordered by stop signs that receive little attention. Their mildly decorated with derelict paint, once yellow or white, and now bordering nothing. And every one of them is littered with pot holes.
They come from plow trucks. Most, anyway. The snow falls each season, -- cold, wet, and damaging, -- then gets scooped away by a great big plow shovel that sometimes take a little gravel along with it. But, that’s not all. They come from piss poor replacements of missing chunks of street as well.
Every pot hole fixed poorly will one day be a pot hole of greater proportion. Either from a plow shovel, or some asshole to lazy to remove the snow chains from his tires.
If you live in a city like mine, you already know this. If you don’t, now you do know, and knowing is half the battle.
(G.I. Joe.)
Even the covered pot holes are dangerous. Imagine hitting an uneven speed bump three or four inches in height while doing sixty five on the free way. Even hitting them at thirty in the city is a surprise fuck to your shocks and suspension. The only way to remedy these problems is to rip out every uneven pot hole, fill it back in evenly, then fill in the fresh holes.
Evenly.
But this presents two new problems. One: most streets are so screwed at this point the city will have to completely demolish them and start fresh. Two: people around here already drive like dick heads. If we give them clean, even surfaces to travel on, the accidental death rate will skyrocket.
The solution? Fix the roads, and install speed-bumps in all appropriate areas. (Schools, Hospitals, etc.)
They could have done this a long time ago, but never did, and never will.
We have the budget. This city is over populated with personal vehicles, each one earning its own excise tax for such things as pot hole repair, and the city (wink wink) wants to keep as much of it as possible. That’s the sad truth of it all.
They will spend enough money each year to keep the budget from being lowered, -- because if they don’t spend enough it shrinks, whether they like it or not, -- but never all of it, and all of it is roughly what we’ll need to get the job done right.
(Once every ten or fifteen years should suffice.)
The way the city sees it, the pot holes are cheap speed control devices that require little attention. They refuse to fix the problem, because they believe the problem has fixed itself.
You see?
If they had paid my Father back, they would be admitting there was a problem. Then they would have to build speed bumps, better the city, give the residents a little more pride in being residents, and spend money they don’t want to spend. And, why would they spend our money on us, when they could spend it elsewhere?
Answer: Their a bunch of Fucking Twats.
Tell your Friends.
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