Men stood around doing nothing

[Canadianpancake]

The road outside my house is being surfaced today, involving several wagons and other large vehicles, and lots of men who for the most part are stood around watching other men do their bit of the job. There's two men in particular who don't seem to have done anything at all yet today, despite it being nearly lunchtime. Aibu to wish i could get paid for standing around doing nothing for half the day?

I'm also pissed off at the flipping beeping noise all the vehicles are making, because apparently it's compulsory to constantly have them all in reverse all the time.

Drove past a council guy in Bodmin, working on the pavement, picking up little and i mean very little twigs (3 or 4 inches long) on a pavement, one at a time, with a picker up stick thing, and throwing them into the grass verge........ behind him but on the road was a bloody great road sweeper (2 men in it) moving at the same pace he was.....(not sweeping up anything) behind that was about 40 cars waiting to get by.

i thought why???? the wind will just blow them back again and he could do it far far quicker with an electric blower or just a brush... council are deciding today how much to put council tax up by.......

When i used to spend a lot of time in France, i used to be amazed at how little staff are used to do minor works compared to the UK.

YANBU

One is probably a foreman and the other well who knows.

Gone are the days of MN when 'light hearted' was not even a twinkle in anyone's eye back when it was all fields round here.

Are you sure you can't ask them to build you a ramp or something?

Go out and ask them what their jobs are OP. Report back.

You would hate India OP. I was struck by how many people it took to do any one job. One fort we went to had one person issuing tickets, followed by another person checking the tickets, who handed them to another person to be scanned on a phone who handed them to someone else to be hole punched........but they were all earning a wage and supporting families.

Haha are you my neighbour OP? Road/building works are a right pain and I know they're only doing their job/it's not their fault that the roads all along my estate are like navigating an assault course etc but yes, when half a ton of rubble is dumped in the middle of the road, the road is then blocked off and nothing then happens to it for a week, I get a bit crotchety too.

And the beeping is getting in my nerves too because I'm trying to write my dissertation and I can't concentrate. NB this was a lighthearted response!

Jesus Christ, some po-faced fun sponges on this thread.

Doesn’t everyone have a moan about the miles of coned off motorway and the three fellas with cups of tea supervising the one bloke on a small digger?!

The road outside our house is being resurfaced so from 7.30 am we have beep beep noises constantly, we also have a huge grass verge outside our house that all the huge lorries have parked on. Most of the men have been sitting in their lorries sleeping or eating since 8.am, only 2 men put traffic cones and nobody has done any work yet, its 12.35pm. They will be for weeks <img loading="lazy" class="inline-flex mumsnet-emoji" alt="Grin" src="https://www.mumsnet.com/build/assets/grin-D7Eg_B6y.png"> <img loading="lazy" class="inline-flex mumsnet-emoji" alt="Grin" src="https://www.mumsnet.com/build/assets/grin-D7Eg_B6y.png"> Im in my polytunnel even though the wind is howling and I have the radio on to drown out the noise. No or though...………...yet

Go out there now and say "Gizza job, I can do that, Gizza job" in the manner of Yosser Hughes and see what they say.

We have roadworks near us, it appears that one guy is employed to work the traffic lights and the button for the pedestrian button, best thing I saw was one of the houses opposite came out with a cup of tea and a cake for him, when we had a massive storm.

@CandyCaneLeBonBon never mind neighbours, I think we must be the same person! I am also writing my dissertation, and for the past month the only day they've been riding the groundwork for the road surfacing is on a Wednesday, when I'm at home trying to study. So they've been raising drains, lowering kerbs, lowering, drains, raising kerbs etc etc etc, then putting cones on/around the bits theywere working on which they would leave for a whole week until the following Wednesday when they would come back and carry on.

So there are cones in the middle of the road all over the estate and in front of driveways(mine being one of them). People can't get into their drives so they park on the road, but the road is also full of cones covering raised drains, so it's like extreme slalom trying to get in and out of the estate, and nothing happens for an entire 7 days!!

@GoddessArtemis they are now all on lunch. I feel quite sorry for the bloke that's raking, can they not take it in turns?

Ahh we had roadworks a street away last year.

Whenever I walked past it was like a scene from the kitchen at your average party, but with more hi-vis.

But, training, needing a certain number of people on site, some people qualified to drive x but not y, etc.

@FizzyGreenWater yeah, I'm a bit jealous sat all by myself watching them have such a lovely time. A bit like they're having a street party I've not been invited to.

Parellisable ,
New word for me

@viques post reminds me, we were holidaying in Sri Lanka and popped into a handicraft shop to buy some souvenirs. There were seven, SEVEN, staff members serving us at the cashier. Two cashiers entering the items and cost into the till, two others bagging up the souvenirs and three others just hanging around and watching! 😂

Hahaha yes!

Get a hi vis and stand with them OP

lots of men who are stood around for the most part watching other men do their bit of the job

Those are supervisors!

Funny that when it's a private/small firm doing a job, they multi-task, but when it's a council/railway job, it's "one person, one job"

You should try watching some of the live railway webcams when there's work going on. Literally dozens of workers sauntering around chatting. There's a classic one online somewhere with about a dozen blokes. Two of them had shovels. One dug a small hole, then a different one put in some cement mix, a third put in the water, a fourth put in the sign, and then a fifth used his shovel to back-fill the top of the hole with gravel. Not much "skilled" work there needing so many people with "different" skills, not to mention all the others who stood and watched and didn't actually do anything.

My point exactly with the raking. Would it be so difficult for someone to grab a rake and give him a hand!?

I'm of work sick actually, so in essence I'm getting paid to sit and watch people that are being paid to stand around and watch people

I will never understand why they have to cone off 30 miles of motorway or fast road for months on end and reduce it all to 50mph, when they're obviously going to take forever to cover it all. Why wouldn't you just cone off one or two miles at a time, do the job there and then move on to the next bit? It's so galling when motorway speeds are reduced to less than that of a windy A-road in order to protect the workers who are just never, ever there.

For some reason, I'm reminded of the old joke about the two council workmen working along the side of a very long major road. The first man would take his shovel and dig a deep hole whilst the second man stood and watched him. After that, the second man would get his shovel and fill the hole in again with the same soil, whilst the first man watched, and then they moved a yard along the road and did the same again. A woman watching from her house went over and asked them just what they thought they were actually achieving. One replied "Just doing the jobs we're paid to do, Ma'am - it's not our fault that Dave, who plants the trees, is off sick today."

I hate people like you who think they know other people’s job roles. My dh does this line of work. It’s bloody hard work and to you it may look like nothing is going on but they each have their own roles and are trained/qualified in various jobs, there are various certificates they need to use certain tools and machinery and some can not by law work these if they do not have the certification. The job is also dangerous, several road workers per year die whilst fixing the damage to our highways. They also get so much abuse from the general public that in recent years (dh has done the job for 30 years) they have to wear cameras, dh’s colleague had a bottle of urine thrown over him the other week because of some angry knob-head who though he was above the road closure restrictions, one had the contents of some other dick-heads lunch box hurled at him, people are raving lunatics. Research the job before you have an uneducated opinion on it!!

You would think that they'd be able to multi-task, though, wouldn't you? Surely the skills required to use a spanner and undo a bolt, place a piece if pipe in and then rake over the surface aren't such niche specialisms that one man couldn't possibly learn to do all of them?

I get the importance of a banksman, when a vehicle is being moved, but when it's only moved a few times an hour and then parked up, surely the same man could be redeployed elsewhere to do a bit of raking or something rather than just stand there for 15 minutes doing nothing?

Workmen always get a bad rep. We passed roadworks a while back and DH said, look they're on one of their 'many' breaks. I cheerfully informed DH that it was 12.30 and the man in the van was most likely eating a well-earned sandwich and cup of tea.
We are currently having work done on one of our main roundabouts (widening and adding lanes etc). The workmen have been working in awful weather and I for one would not swap with them