Lots of asses, tons of fault, but not much pavin' goin' on

There's a short stretch -- maybe a third of a mile -- of well-traveled road here in town that's been a mess for years.  It was an asphalt quilt of ancient scars from gas line repairs, water department patch jobs, frost heaves, potholes...the works.  Rattle down this road and by the time you hit the lights at the bottom you'd have typically lost all four hubcaps, your transmission and most of your fillings.  But roads am hard and flower boxes am easy, so my city spent most of twenty years watering tulips on traffic islands and left this road to degrade into the Yucatan Peninsula after the asteroid hit.  Two years ago it finally crawled its way up to the top of the city's home improvement to-do list, and so the sturdy gents with the steely gaze and arms like muscled girders from the Department of Public Works set about dialing the telephone to get someone to fix it.

Well, of course our ten thousand city employees don't do road work themselves.  Paragraph 475, subsection ZZZ of union rules clearly states:

Neither city officials nor residents may wake from slumber for the act of work (hereafter defined as "that stuff we keep the rest of you from doing by parking our orange trucks in the middle of the street and going for coffee for four hours") any employee of the Department of Public Works until their shifts are over, except in the event of a.) foreign invasion, b.) civil unrest or c.) natural catastrophe, during which time it may be permissible to awaken said DPW employee with a kiss to the lips from a handsome prince, but only if said prince meets a minimum standard of pulchritude according to a panel of union officials as agreed to in Section Eight, paragraph 8,192,322, subsection THEJOKESONYOUSUCKERS.

The road probably needed to be completely ripped up and redone, but what do I know?  Like all good Borg, I've learned not to question the wisdom of the Collective.  The existing pavement was scarified and a sewer necromancer was brought in to raise all the manholes, the upshot being that for months the road became an obstacle course even more impassable than it had been the previous two decades.  Rather than repair this third-of-a-mile stretch of road lickety-split, it went from being bumpier than the surface of the moon to bumpier than the surface of General Noriega's face.

During all this time there were a lot of trucks and a lot of bulldozers parked all over, but very little actual anything seemed to get done.  It eventually became too much of a hassle and so rather than take the Panama Canal I was forced to travel the long way 'round the tip of Tierra del Fuego every time I went to the mall which, a small blessing for me, isn't very often.

One day I suddenly thought, "Hey, I wonder whatever happened to that street I lost touch with...now where did it used to be again?"

I found it where I'd left it, and it had finally been resurfaced.  But, ominously, many of the bulldozers and other heavy equipment still loomed at the shoulders.

Soon, the water department came along, ripped up and patched around their manholes.  Not to be outdone, the sewer people did the same, but worse.  The gas company, drawn by that new-road-smell, decided this would be the perfect time to break out the jackhammers their moms knitted them for Christmas.

The work of the Cobblestone Fanciers Club took less time than the resurfacing.  I drove on the road last night, and it is now at least as bad as, and perhaps even worse than, it was before the thoroughgoing incompetents of the Government Knows Best crowd took on the great 1/3 mile road repair job of 2010 -20??.

And this, America, is why I don't trust government to handle even the simplest stuff, the stuff that it is its job to handle.

You think you're annoyed at that long wait to see your doctor now?  Get ready for that day very soon when these guys have moved their orange cones and six hour coffee breaks out of the hot sun and into the air-conditioned waiting room of every M.D.'s office in the country.

Don't worry.  After you've died waiting for that lifesaving treatment that was so easy to come by three years ago, the brown-shirt recycling squad will put you to eternal work as pothole filler.  At least until you wash out after the first light rain.