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.

@mantarays “ You have no idea what they are waiting for.”

I’ve been reading a lot of horror fiction recently and this gave me the chills!

I have a strange nostalgic fondness for manually-operated stop/go signs.

They use them round here when the works are continually moving along 100 yards or so - digging out drainage channels or trimming big trees etc. Makes more sense than having to keep moving the electronic ones. I also think they're better because the blokes can see whether a long queue is building up more at one end than the other, so they can adjust what they're doing to balance things out better.

There's nothing worse than being stuck in a mile-long queue in the rush hour, to finally get through and then see the queue going the other way is only 3 cars long...

Give me two men any day.

I was watching the workers outside my house a few weeks ago - there was a guy who parked up and spent 3hrs on his phone, never even got out of the van. Another van of 3 blokes, only one of which did any work, the rest sat playing on their phones for almost the whole day while blocking all access to my house and driveway despite it otherwise being an empty street 🙄.
I'd love to know how much they were paid for that day of work.

Just think, back before health and safety went nuts, little striped tents popped up and the workers could be sitting around drinking tea, when it wasnt their turn. Nowadays cuz of that they have to stand around in all sorts of weather and dehydrate so that they can no longer be seen to be lazy.

There does seem to be a lot of duplication of roles in road works/construction etc that is mystifying to the untrained eye.

My cousin used to work for a London borough. His job was to drive to roads where potholes had been reported, measure them and assess if they needed filling. If they met the necessary criteria he would mark them with spray paint and submit a works request for that road. Then, a few or many weeks later, a crew would come out and fill in the marked holes.

It always seemed like such a duplication of effort to me. Why couldn’t the trained and experienced crew just go to the site, make an on the spot assessment of what repairs were needed and fix them there and then? I’m sure that they could have ensured visits were timed to minimise traffic disruption. Local knowledge would make them aware of when to avoid school runs or roads that get clogged in the rush hour.

Just to make the system even more unwieldy if a pothole hadn’t met repair criteria at the time of my cousins site visit but had deteriorated during the weeks between his assessment and the crews visit, they weren’t authorised to use their initiative and fill the large but unmarked hole but would have to notify his office. He would then visit again, mark and report again and the whole process would be repeated.

59Canadianpancake said....

" @Childrenofthestones yes I am! grin "

Hahaha.... knew it 😁

Ah OP it's Mumsnet 2020 ... you forgot to put "lighthearted" in the title!! Hahah

@Canadianpancake I hear ya! Hope the dissertation is taking shape - when's hand in? Do you hate your topic yet??

I'm also worried that road access is now so I'm right our bins can't be collected and there's no access for emergency services. So that's fun

@CandyCaneLeBonBon tweaking my proposal at the moment so still quite excited 😁 but I know I will be very fed of it by the end of summer when I hand it in.

Well best of luck with it @Canadianpancake
Mine's in next week so I really should get off MN and finish the fucker off!

It's the same in offices all over the country! Men staring at screens and cock jostling in meetings - but actually doing fuck all.

@ironicname in quest of not offending anyone we agreed earlier in the thread that the men are all obviously very busy, but as an ignorant observer I am just unaware of the Very Important Jobs that they are all doing. I should imagine it is the same with the men in the offices...

@canadianpancake

Of course! I'm just too female to understand complex nature of what appears to be shirking..:

Exactly. What I thought was two blokes standing around during a packet of sweets was actually a very complicated process that requires years of expertise and training. But my silly pink brain just saw two lazy arse workmen having a chat.

Sharing, not during

What kinda sweets were they? Were you close enough to see?

I'm not sure, I assumed they were some kind of hard boiled variety because they seemed to be sucking rather than chewing

My DH has that certificate for putting cones out and he says it's a farce. He says they show you what you do, then you do it, and you pass. He says he can't understand how anyone would fail it, and anyway no one actually follows the rules it teaches when putting cones etc out on the job. He's not a workman but he manages a team of them.

I'm putting my tin hat on now.

I’ll just leave this here

My DH has that certificate for putting cones out and he says it's a farce. He says they show you what you do, then you do it, and you pass. He says he can't understand how anyone would fail it,

I know there are a lot of things that look easy but actually take quite a bit of skill and experience to make them look that way - but how could marking off a lane or area with cones possibly fall into that category? It's just a grown up version of 'jumpers for goalposts' in the playground, isn't it? Making it into an actual course with a qualification just makes a mockery of all the other practical jobs that do take learning and require genuine skills.

I genuinely can't believe that there would be people (unless maybe they have severe learning difficulties) who have as their job putting out and taking back cones and nothing else whatsoever.

Surely it's just one small part of a much bigger overall job, the same as an evening cleaner would have to flick on a light switch to be able to work in a dark room, but you'd never in a million years consider her/his job as 'light source enabler'.

It happens in other professions as well, as this short documentary shows.

I just want to know where it is you live that you are getting your road resurfaced!

I genuinely can't believe that there would be people (unless maybe they have severe learning difficulties) who have as their job putting out and taking back cones and nothing else whatsoever.

There are. When we had low gas pressure, National Grid had to dig up our drive to put in a wider pipe. Two blokes arrived in a van around 10am, looked at the drive, and said they had to wait for the "man with the signs" before they could start digging. Now we're at the end of a quiet cul de sac which sees maybe 5 cars for the entire day and no passing pedestrians (as there's nowhere to go except our house). Two hours later a guy in another van arrived and put out several roadworks signs, a few barriers and cones. That took it to around 12 noon. The two original guys only then got out of their van and started laying out their equipment (drill, shovel, etc) - that took them an hour. By which time it was 1pm and they got in their van and buggered off to the chippie. Bang on 2pm, they came back and finally started digging the hole about 2.30pm. By 3.30, they'd dug it, exposed the pipe junction, and got back in their van. Around an hour later, yet another different guy in a van arrived with a yellow cover to put over the hole. Then they all went. So 3 vans, 4 people, and a full working day for what was about half an hour of actual work to dig the hole.

Crazy - no wonder things are so expensive with that kind of inefficiency.

And don't say it's all necessary. It isn't. We had similar with BT replacing our landline wire (under our front lawn). One bloke, one van, a morning's work - he put out his own sign, put his own cover over the hole, dug his own trench, installed the cable, and back filled the trench again, all with a retractable barrier which he put around the manhole cover he took up to access the main cabling.

My dad used to call it the Ashton coat of arms.

One working three watching.