Enhancing Performance

The plethora of email spam touting male enhancement and performance provided by magic herbal potions, little blue pills, under-the-counter prescription drugs and powders of exotic animal parts seems endless. One can only hope that the people flogging these cures for erectile deficiencies will soon move on to something else like electronic greetings cards from your pastor/friend/school mate/family. Surely, every male worth his salt will have solved his performance problems by now. Of course, his partner may have different performance measurements than the under-performing man who is the object of all this internet marketing.

In my bad old days at City Hall, we were just getting into the use of Performance Measurements for all things done in the name of public service. The Province had a set of standards for doing various jobs, for example, snow plowing a road. The job would be measured in how long after a snowfall of n centimetres it took the crew to clear the snow away, depending on whether this was a main thoroughfare, a school bus route or a short residential street. Many things went into the formula, such as the number of trucks available per kilometre of roads to plow; the availability of personnel; the temperature; time of day; traffic load, and other pertinent factors.

This, of course, required some serious record keeping by Public Works. How do you account for travel time to the job? How do you account for coffee breaks, time for gathering tools and Bump signs for the job, safety meetings, ex camera training and sick days? As I recall, this was simply thought to be too complicated and the whole program was deferred and given lip service for provincial purposes. However, one of the performance measurements that struck me as a good measuring tool was how the crew felt about the job after they finished the work and how the public rated their work effort.

In view of the recent pavement patching jobs by city crews, it is just as well that the City gave up on Performance Measurement. If the crews are satisfied with the condition of the roadway after their work, the public, from letters to the editor and Baytoday, certainly are not. It is true that the crews now take ‘Bump’ signs with them as a required part of their equipment list, but those apology signs hardly make a substitute for a job well done. Knowing a few of the city workers, I am certain they are not happy leaving those shock absorber-testing patches on our streets. I guess they have had to adapt to the new way of doing business at the City, the same as the rest of us.

The lumpy, bumpy cold-mix patches are no doubt part of the grand scheme to save money, as a contractor will be hired at some distant date to do a hot-mix permanent patch that will smooth the way for drivers. In the previously mentioned bad old days, city crews would take a compactor and a roller with them to put the finishing touches on jobs where they had to tear up the asphalt. That certainly beats today’s method of a work crew jumping up and down with their work-boots on the cold mix after shovelling it onto a rough, un-compacted surface.

The specifications for applying cold mix on highways calls for the use of a ten-tonne roller to pass over the patch until the surface is even with the roadway and free of ruts and bumps. These big steel rollers used to be called steamrollers, and they were a common sight at construction jobs. For smaller jobs, like the ones the city crews do, a gas-powered roller did the trick. I guess the one they had at Public Works got too old and was retired. It suffered the fate of being replaced by a contract worker, albeit a mechanical one used by a paving company.

Perhaps it is time for the driving public to express their appreciation (or lack thereof) every time they bounce over one of the rough patches. I was thinking about a short blast of the horn, but the people living near the bump signs would soon tire of that. Maybe drivers should just speed-dial the Mayor or Chair of Works on their cell phone, give their location and say “Bump!” Adding expletives is optional.

As for the work crews, if they want to enhance their performance, they might borrow the steamroller from the Fifth Floor at City Hall. It has already flattened the Heritage Festival and Council will not need it after they sell Otter Lake. Unless they are going to steamroller over public opinion on Sweetman’s Garden and Amelia Park as well.