The following picture shows how my day started:
Not too bad. Easy enough to follow. If you're into excavation safety, the blue paint left by the water company is telling you that a standard, one-inch water line is buried just beneath. Although, with that standard-issue water line comes an 18-inch tolerance zone in either direction. You see, utility line markings are approximations. So, if you drill on either side of that paint, but within 18-inches of the paint and rupture a water main...that's when the utility company points the finger of blame for the resulting flooding directly at you and your employer.
The yellow paint is telling you that this particular structure has no gas line running into it. So, we can breathe easier because no matter what you do, you will not cause a natural gas explosion, destroy the entire structure, or kill the inhabitants contained within it. Nice.
This next picture displays where I then spent the remainder of my day:
No, no, no you silly dummies. This isn't a partially flooded crawl space we're working in today. No, this is a crawl space permeated by the rank smell of raw sewage seeping into it. And yet, they wonder why I"m always half-cocked and ready to go off on whoever wants it?
When it comes to jobs such as these, I always think back to a line I heard in a war movie. I'm paraphrasing here:
The brave are the ones who are afraid to go, but go anyway.
While listening to WILK's Steve Corbett last night, I learned that, now that the primary election is all but over and in the books, now Pittston's Wil Toole wants to be the next Luzerne County controller. A lame-ass write-in campaign, I suppose.
Assuming there is actually something this guy is genuinely good at, I suggest that he go and do it, and never bother any of us again. Because running anything of importance in these parts are definately beyond his limited capabilities.
It just never ends in this backwards county of ours.
Oh, yeah! This is too good to pass up.
They tell me Kingston's Steve Urbanski made an appearance on the WBRE news, proudly displaying a literal sea of election yard signs displayed on his property. Coincidentally (yeah, right!), Norton the Blogger posted a picture of the very same sea of yard signs on his ill-fated blog. This is about what you should expect from those who engage in freelance idiocy.
It's funny how these two are practically tied at the hip, isn't it?
It seems that Norton/Steve is bright like I am functionally illiterate.
Dork.
Then we have this issue wherein serving on the government study commission and also serving as the county controller could be a possible conflict of interest.
Frankly, I don't see it that way. Admittedly, I'm no solicitor, private attorney or supreme court justice, nor do I play one on any anonymously-written blog. But hear me out.
The 11 members of the study commission are charged with devising a new-and-improved system of county government, doing it timely enough to get it on the ballot in the alotted time, and then putting it to the voters as to whether they want it implemented or not.
No one person on that study commission can mandate anything. No one in that group can forward any suggestion to the voting public without first achieving a consensus among his or her fellow study cohorts.
The ironic part of this is, if I'm proven to be wrong, if a sitting member of a government being studied for improvements cannot also serve on the government study commission conducting the study...then what you're telling me is that the elected members of our county government are not allowed to seek out a way to make said government more efficient, more economical, more transparent, and more responsive.
In conclusion, if it really is a conflict of interest just waiting to grow some legs, if it is somehow wrong for those elected to manage the government to pursue better ways of prosecuting that mode of governance, then we are mere tadpoles swimming headlong into an inflatable dam. We are wasting our time, and it's time to move on to the next best available place.
Only in Luzerne County could it be a conflict of interest for the goverment to strive to be better than it currently is.
Only in Luzerne County.
Buh-bye
No comments:
Post a Comment