Remember this picture from last week?

Well, now imagine the hole being a 12-foot trench that extends length-wise down the block. Our neighbor called us (we’re at the in-laws this weekend) to let us know that the construction workers knocked out the power to our houses and she would be letting the electric company inside to fix the problem. And last week, some putz forgot to load up a truck on Friday afternoon so came to hurriedly “fix” his mistake Saturday morning. Unfortunately, said genius hadn’t done the math to figure out that operating loud, 10-ton machinery at 7:30 am on a Saturday might make the neighbors notice and, what’s worse, he hadn’t figured out that you really shouldn’t hurry when driving a 10-ton piece of machinery. See those giant blocks of concrete in the picture? He dropped one of those off the side of his truck because he was rushing. Not exactly flying under the radar, now is it?

And because he wanted to get out of there before anyone noticed, his erratic driving broke a wooden pole propping up the wires (see picture) that run from across the street to our house and severed the cable television line. What’s better yet, said schmuck coiled up the cable quickly and threw it across the street and was going to drive away—without telling us. Happily, Amy ran outside in her pajamas (I was still fumbling for my glasses) and said, “Excuse me, I think you just clipped our cable line.” The guy said, “I did?” And Amy said, “Yeah. You know, the one you picked up and threw over on the other side of the road.” To which he then began a jittery “I’m sorry but I’m not even supposed to be here” excuse as if it was our fault he was going to get busted. He promised a friend would come by to fix the cable line on Tuesday so we shouldn’t worry. As of Friday, it still wasn’t fixed and the guy was nowhere to be seen, so I described the situation to his foreman and politely asked when the situation would be rectified. To his credit, the foreman was extremely polite to me but apparently not too impressed with his employee. Poor guy. It’s a good thing we use satellite TV.

I understand that the sewer lines probably need to be replaced. In more philosophical moods, I guess I can even understand why people living on the street need to help subsidize the cost. Yet the problem as I see it is that these guys fuck up streets for a living, and I would suggest that they tend to become desensitized to the fact that people are actually living in the homes around them—people who are greatly inconvenienced by coming home on a Friday afternoon to find a bulldozer parked in front of their driveway (which happened to the woman across the street), or going outside at 8:00 am to see that no, you can’t take your car out for an errand because there’s a bottomless pit in front of your house (which was my situation until 6:00 pm this past Friday—and I’m relieved there was no emergency).

These things are annoying. Happily, we’ve been told that construction should be done sometime before November.