How Many Men...

Sounds like there’s a man missing......who’s making the tea before the job starts, again half way through and that final brew to celebrate a job well done? 

Unless of course it’s the man with with the can of tar, as he’s the only one that’s been on the course and got the certificate to say he can handle hot liquids? 

Thqts the public sector for you

The sad thing is they will all be back in several weeks time to have another attempt at it.

A couple of years or so ago, there was a feature on TV about a couple of gents who'd designed a machine to fill in potholes. A vehicle was equipped with cutting equipment that cut out around the pothole to a predetermined shape, dependant on the pothole's size, and then would automatically select the corresponding prefabricated patch from its on-board store, which would drop in perfectly and be automatically bonded in place. The whole operation took seconds to complete, with a two-man crew, and the result was far more durable than the usual bodge carried out, with practically no traffic disruption. A real win-win, except...As usual, as far as I can tell, the idea's gone the way of so many other schemes that require an initial extra investment, yet offer considerable potential future benefits. Shame.

tonym posted:

A couple of years or so ago, there was a feature on TV about a couple of gents who'd designed a machine to fill in potholes. A vehicle was equipped with cutting equipment that cut out around the pothole to a predetermined shape, dependant on the pothole's size, and then would automatically select the corresponding prefabricated patch from its on-board store, which would drop in perfectly and be automatically bonded in place. The whole operation took seconds to complete, with a two-man crew, and the result was far more durable than the usual bodge carried out, with practically no traffic disruption. A real win-win, except...As usual, as far as I can tell, the idea's gone the way of so many other schemes that require an initial extra investment, yet offer considerable potential future benefits. Shame.

A terrible idea - taking work away from honest working men.  Good Grief!  It even sounds like women could do that job.  Whatever were they thinking of?  And if it's so quick, what's the guarantee that other holes will appear fast enough to provide sufficient work?

A couple of roads near me are particularly bad, with huge, deep potholes, in one case a small ravine right across the road (burst my tyre on that one last weekend).  They recently sent a mobile work crew round to a couple of the roads, but they only filled a select few of the holes, didn't bother with the rest, including one huge sunken bit.  Fortunately they did fill in the grand canyon one, but there are loads of other holes they didn't bother with.  But we are a rural area, and so don't really count.

notnaim man posted:

...you remember the schooldays maths questions about digging trenches?

I do indeed.  I used to think that the answer they gave to the question "if it takes one man to dig a hole in 5 hours, how long would it take 2 men" was wrong.  It would certainly take 5 hours, and possibly longer because they'd need more tea breaks, chat breaks, discussions about the best way to go about the job, what happened in the football last night etc.  Plus, of course, if the hole is not big enough to get two men in at once, then we could be talking 10 hours.  I was told that I over-thought things, but I claim it was just plain observation.

 

Reminds me of a few years ago travelling in Rajasthan ... we drove up to a toll booth on a highway... no automatic credit card controlled barriers here ... after a short wait queuing in the plaza shared with elephants, monkeys and all sorts of humanity.. it felt like the  Mos Eisley space port on the planet Tatooine.

1) a man beckoned us to the available booth

2) another armed man watched over us from across the other side of the barrier

3) a man came to the car asking for payment

4) he returned to a booth / office where as far as I could see there were two other men

5) one of the men in the booth/office signalled to another man to open the barrier and to the armed guard

We drove through and were on our way... although it took  6 men to take payment and open the gate... it did seem to run quite smoothly....

Reminds me of when I bought my vinyl copy of The Pixies' "Trompe Le Monde" from a record shop in Moscow. Having spotted this album in the rather sparse rack, I went to pick it out but a stern lady assistant left me in no doubt that this wasn't the correct procedure. I then had to join a queue, and when it was my turn, another lady followed me to the rack and lifted said LP, which she took back to her counter. I was then presented with a small piece of paper, which I had to take to a pair of ladies at the till. I duly presented my little docket, and paid (in US dollars. Well, one anyway, for which I received some small change). Another piece of paper was presented, which I then had to take back to the other lady. But wait, there's more...

I had to join another queue, LP in hand, to have it carefully placed in a paper bag, before I could leave the shop, presenting my receipt to another lady at the door before I could get out. Good LP though.

All this reminded me of a Max Boyce song from many years ago...

Slow, Men at Work.

It's about Council Road Men, absolutely brilliant.

There's also Bernard Cribbins; "Hole in the Ground".

Q:   How many men does it take to change a lightbulb?

A:    Four, one to change the lightbulb and three to admire the skill with which it was done!

I was the one on the lorry. I was posting valuable advice and opinions on this very forum.

Hi Ardbeg,

And a very important function that is, particularly if the job was to install a power cable from someone's HiFi system direct to the sub-station!

Yes, and maybe good to mention that the QA engineer of our local team will visit the Naim owners of the street to ask if the sound quality has been improved since the pothole was repaired. It seems that the vibrations caused by the pothole affect the Naim owner not having a Fraim. It is expected that the ones using Mana stands will hear the largest improvements.

Cbr600 posted:

Thqts the public sector for you

Well, then that's in HH territory. I've no doubt he can explain/justify the efficiency that the OP was fortunate enough to observe.

OTOH, they might have just been a bunch of "rip-off" Romainian contractors, bleeding the LA dry for all they are worth, operating as part of a cartel of Black Stuff men, based on phoney tendering.

Still, once we have a Hard Brexit in place and JR-M in charge, things will be much better..........no time for slacking, and TonyM's Magic Machine will have all them potholes filled in no time and no need for imported man-power...........

.........ah! what a lovely future !

When we visited the Soviet Union back in 1984, we noticed that there was a little old lady sitting in the corner of every room of every museum. If you got too close to the artwork, she would holler "Nyet!". In one case she scuttled over and smacked the hand  of a guy who was pointing at a painting from too close in. We called them "nyet ladies", and figured they was part of the SU's vaunted 100% employment.  On a later day, we had a get-together with "Soviet youth", who were junior Komsomol members. They asked us about differences we saw between the SU and the West. We brought up the nyet ladies. They seem a bit offended, but--they asked.

JRHardee posted:

When we visited the Soviet Union back in 1984, we noticed that there was a little old lady sitting in the corner of every room of every museum. If you got too close to the artwork, she would holler "Nyet!". In one case she scuttled over and smacked the hand  of a guy who was pointing at a painting from too close in. We called them "nyet ladies", and figured they was part of the SU's vaunted 100% employment.  On a later day, we had a get-together with "Soviet youth", who were junior Komsomol members. They asked us about differences we saw between the SU and the West. We brought up the nyet ladies. They seem a bit offended, but--they asked.

Not just in museums, also in lifts and in hotel corridors when I was there in 1979.

G

Jeff Anderson posted:

 

A base coat and a topping.

G

JRHardee posted:

When we visited the Soviet Union back in 1984, we noticed that there was a little old lady sitting in the corner of every room of every museum. If you got too close to the artwork, she would holler "Nyet!". In one case she scuttled over and smacked the hand  of a guy who was pointing at a painting from too close in. We called them "nyet ladies", and figured they was part of the SU's vaunted 100% employment.  On a later day, we had a get-together with "Soviet youth", who were junior Komsomol members. They asked us about differences we saw between the SU and the West. We brought up the nyet ladies. They seem a bit offended, but--they asked.

There were little old ladies who sat at the end of the corridors on each floor of the hotels we stopped in, who had kettles and would make you a hot drink at any time of the day. I was thinking they were also there for security, until on a couple of occasions, in the middle of the night, a pair of strangers wandered into my room, a man and a woman, I guess for the purposes of a bit of hows-your-father. Very disconcerting.

Cbr600 posted:

Thqts the public sector for you

You can be virtually certain that the highways maintenance is outsourced to the private sector. Assuming that the company is profit driven you’d expect it to undertake the work in as efficient a way as possible. I’m no highways maintenance expert and I suspect none of the rest of you are either. 

With the huge squeeze on local authority budgets it’s the ‘discretionary’ services such as highways that take the hammering, as statutory social care services must be protected. So it’s only going to get worse. Where we live the roads are so full of potholes at the edges that cyclists are forced to the centre of the road, making cycling more dangerous and increasing congestion. It’s a nightmare. 

So rather than snickering, effort might be better spent in lobbying for proper funding of public services. 

Their next job though was resurfacing the A36 so Naim can get their products shipped quicker ????

notnaim man posted:

...you remember the schooldays maths questions about digging trenches?

Not in any way to denigrate my local authority for attacking the pothole problem, but I had to watch workmen on a narrow road last week -

The driver sat in the lorry on his mobile

The two men with the stop/go boards

The man with the clipboard

The man with the wheelbarrow

The man on the back of the lorry shovelling the asphalt 

The man with the vibrating plate

The man with the watering can

The man with the can of tar sealing the edge of the repair

Honestly, really, for a hole about 18 inches square and 3 deep.

Of course they were economising, because one of them must have been the driver of the van parked behind the lorry and someone must have cleared the loose bits out of the pothole.

For how long did you watch them? 

How long did the job take in total?

Were all the men there for the whole job?

Had they been doing anything in the hole or was it just a pothole repair?

Was it a team moving between possibly bigger jobs?

Easy to criticise, and the criticism may be valid, but the full story needs to be known first.

Update on the Hole filling debate ...

Apparently the authorities are looking into it.....

Cbr600 posted:

Thqts the public sector for you

Probably not... probably some private contractor which is employed at great expense by the council having been forced to make all their road “guys” redundant, then ending up paying more for the job than when it was done by directly employed staff.

Now this is impressive efficiency...

(though I did also read there was some further subsidence a few days after the repair).