One of my favourite things in the world is councils having to apologise for doing extremely silly shit, so please allow me the pleasure of telling you how this Melbourne council’s contractors paved a road around cars instead of just getting them moved.
Merri-Bek City Council sent a letter to residents of McBryde Street, Fawkner, warning that it would be resurfacing the road in the coming days. Which seems like fairly little notice considering heaps of people are on holiday at this time of year and probably not on top of their mail.
It seems we aren’t far off with that speculation, because when contractors arrived to resurface the road, some people had missed the memo and left their cars parked on it.
Instead of doing the normal thing and either a) knocking on doors to find the owners of the cars so they could be moved, or b) postponing the paving until the road was clear, the contractors hired by the council must have thought “fuck it” because they just did their job anyway.
As in, they laid the bitumen on the road as they were paid to do — and just worked around the cars. It’s giving “I simply do not see it”.
Obviously, the results are fkn ridiculous. Just take a look at this nonsense:
Naturally, residents were not impressed with the results.
“It just looks a bit stupid,” Patt Gibbs, who lives on the street, told 9 News.
Fellow resident Monica Hodgkinson said it looked “terrible” and that the “street is probably in a worse state then it was to start with”.
“It’s disappointing because now the street is a mess,” she said.
The council, for its part, has (kind of) apologised for the mess, admitting it chose to move quickly rather than act rationally.
“We took the opportunity to complete these works more quickly when resources were available, which resulted in less notice being provided to residents,” a Merri-bek City Council spokesperson told 9 News.
“We apologise to residents for the inconvenience.”
The road will apparently be resurfaced again to fix the issue, but the council is yet to say when.
