It’s been a little over three weeks now and finally to the wife’s delight we got our television service back yesterday . Coincidentally the first thing that came on was a local Florida station with some unusually good news for a change. The 6000 residents of Sanibel Island can now access their injured properties as the damaged causeway has been temporarily repaired in an impressive three weeks . It’s taken over two years to redo one residential block of street locally and still not done and that impresses me as well.
Seemingly easy to impress I will admit I’m even more impressed by the fact that it took those same three weeks to get the rotted garbage hauled away from our street along with the buzzards and maggots . It had to be done with difficulty as the heavy drooping cable hoisted up in the air on my makeshift telephone pole these past three weeks still wasn’t high enough to get a garbage truck through and still no one has arrived to repair it . Emails and phone calls begging a response to these problems go without response so perhaps there is a need to resort to good old fashioned letters in the mail .
Actually the local Post Office made a rather favorable impression as they were out delivering mail in our neighborhood only two days after the storm . I’ll concede it might have been an easier task for them as half the mailboxes on the street were missing . Some will say that government agency’s are never as efficient as the private sector but there they were like the Pony Express, bringing us our unwanted bills while Amazon was busy losing my long awaited package .
Other government agencies are just as efficient I would think . Like the Army’s Battalion of Combat Engineer’s for instance. Prior to WWII a hobbyist bridge designer , one Donald Bailey designed the famous Bailey Bridge . In 1944 forty men using only hand tools erected a Bailey bridge one thousand feet long in 24 hours that was strong enough to carry a battalion of armored tanks across the river . The original Bailey proto type “temporary” bridge was built in 1940 and is still used as a functioning bridge to this day .
I’m impressed …
