Saturday, January 8, 2011

Over-compensation

After the NY Post exposed the sanitation department last week for their less than stellar snow-removal job you knew what would happened the next time. There were wide-spread reports of trucks driving through south Brooklyn with their plows slightly raised or cruising down streets without their plows down if they were even in the borough at all.
Reports starting flooding in that there had been a major snow-job by the Sanitation department in retaliation for job cuts and demotions and then the writing was on the wall. Before you knew it, you had the perfect combination of hysteria, villains and politicians. Everybody smelled blood in the water and every jackass politician jumped on board calling for hearings and investigations basically to get their names in the paper well after TOR was making the same assessments just from looking out of our own window.

After a few days even Bloomberg got off his 'everything is fine' soap-box and stopped suggesting New Yorkers go catch a show on Broadway and turned on the heat. All of a sudden with the spotlight on the sanitation department there were hundred of plows roaming the streets in South Brooklyn. It was as if somebody was giving out free pizza's for anybody who had a plow on this city owned truck. I counted 4 trucks down one ancillary street in an hour.

The issue was that this was on Wednesday well after the snow on the streets had mostly melted. One truck would drive down and push the snow onto the sidewalk and another would come and shove it back into the street.

Don't tell me that these guys weren't half-assing it before when now they are causing a traffic jam with the amount of passes they were making.
Then today we see a picture on the front page of the Times of a row of trucks waiting at the ready during yesterday's 1 inch of snow and it just reeks of inefficiency and over-compensation. We don't need 50 trucks parading down our streets we need just enough to remove the snow.

Now it is 10 times better than some empty-promises politician but there is an issue with having a business man running a city... they over-compensate. It like when you complain at Outback that your steak is over-cooked, the manager comes out with a free dessert....yeah it might make you shut up but it's not making your steak taste any better.

At the end of the day when it comes to running a city or state, what you need is the practical thought of a business man with the ingrained desire to get things done and the political clout to demand it from his overpaid unions.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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