A Happy New Year
Added on Wednesday 13 Jan 2010
to my reader, and as I am in a slightly up beat mood (I should be back to normal soon) I would like to offer a thanks to someone.
Not having had any post since the snow first fell - no doubt due to the snow and health and safety - I decided to walk up to the sorting office in Oakfield and see if there was any for me, in particular some packages containing “big boys toys”.
Slip sliding along Oakfield High Street I came across two Water Board (contrators) chaps working in a hole repairing someones water meter. One had bare hands and was fitting a new hose that was partly under water. One looked up and I said something like ‘I hope you are on double time with time off in lue for this.
‘Chance would be a fine thing’ he replied.
I said that I thought they were doing a sterling job and thanked them for coming out in all weathers.
They said it was rare that a member of the public would come up to them and thank them when even some of their customers can’t be bothered, no doubt too engrossed in watching Strictly Mundane or Britains Got Tacky or other such electronic Mogadon.
In conversation it seems there is not the uptake in jobs as there use to be with new life coming into the utilities industry.
No doubt this is down to government policies on insisting that 50% of school leavers should go into higher education and obtain a degree along with a large debt. A lot of these degrees don’t mean anything in the real world (I left school with just a certificate that said I could swim 22 yards breast stroke - It had a little triangle of red felt pinned to it for sewing onto my swimming trunks. How cool was that?.
I can imagine in ten years time when one phones a utility company to report say a burst water pipe and the operator saying.
‘We don’t have anybody available just yet, but we can send someone with a degree in Media Studies that can talk about Eastenders or a Hairdresser that can touch up your high lights’
I’ve just had a thought.
Question: How many Investment Bankers does it take to dig a hole.
Answer: Nearly all of them, but the Tax payer will have to fill it in.
I’m stepping out of character, now back to these to guys in the hole.
They were not the only ones out there. I saw another couple in Union street over the weekend doing the same thing. Perhaps it was the same chaps.
So dear reader. Next time you walk past some chaps digging up the road, go over and say thank you for being there. I would not like to do their job and neither would you. Even for double time with time off in leu. A degree is not worth the paper it is written on if it were not for these guys working in a hole in the ground.
Think about it.
Ryde Grumpy
