Contractors paint sock tied to railing instead of removing it
The town council in Blackpool, UK hired St Annes Decorators Ltd. to repaint the railings over the North Promenade -- but when the contractors reached a sock tied to the railing, they simply painted it.
Contractors sprucing up North Promenade took an astonishing short cut when they came across the abandoned footwear tied to a railing. Rather than remove it - they painted OVER it! ...
Passerby Andrew Purcell, 22, from Leyland who is working in the area, said: "I think painting round a sock instead of just moving it could quite possibly be the laziest thing I've ever seen.
"It does look quite funny tied there, but I suppose it must be annoying for the council if they are trying to improve the look of Blackpool."
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I'm sorry -- were they HIRED to remove socks from the railing? No? How about PAID to remove socks from the railing? Just paint? Ok, job done.
Maybe they did it on purpose just for kicks ?/
Also see this classic:
http://canhappensonlyinindia.blogspot.com/2008/05/funny-road-safety-line.html
But it's Blackpool! A painted sock tied to a railing could be a new mascot for Blackpool. Seriously, I love the place, but it's true.
At my last apartment we found a hair comb painted into the corner of the walls. Upon discovery we promptly removed it and found a more prominent place to display it. This story reminded me of that.
Right up there with this classic:
http://www.mindspring.com/~possums/DeadPossum.jpg
I found the story on Arbroath, which has more:
http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2008/09/painters-shortcut-leaves-council-red.html
Boing Boing has brought many, many injustices to the attention of the world, but this just might possibly be the unjustiest.
well said mujadaddy (#2).
I'm sure it's written into their contracts not to disturb the environment, just to paint.
I know if I wasn't being given bonuses for trash picked up I wouldn't care either.
This is nothing new. It's what happens when you hire out work to the lowest bidder. My last apartment complex always hired a painting company that managed the low bid by using work-release prisoners from the nearby state prison. They painted over posters, mirrors, dirt, dust, hair, tape, and anything else that was stuck to the wall.
In fairness to the contractors, the painted sock does make the town look more spruced up than a non-painted sock.
Having grown up in Blackpool, the funniest part of this is the name "St Annes Decorators", named after the place just down the coast which has always been the town's snooty, middle class cousin. If the painters are from St Annes maybe they thought none of the residents would notice or care. Blackpool is so dishevelled these days it is rather fitting.
One of my old apartments had a kitchen knife painted over on the shelf in the closet. Found that lovely frightening sight when I was putting boxes up after moving in.
-heather
Related: http://gothamist.com/2008/09/16/photo_of_the_day.php
Beyond the nature of contract labor to be "I'm not doing it unless I'm being paid to do it" literal, there are also legal reasons why such "laziness" is suddenly justified.
As I understand it, many employers will do everything they can to escape responsibility to worker's comp claims, and injuries incurred while doing something that isn't "your job" are a common way to shirk that responsibility. Those laborers likely know that if they were to somehow injure themselves in the course of removing that sock, it's unlikely that their employer would take responsibility for compensating them. In effect, "if removing a sock wasn't your job, you weren't injured on the job."
And they didn't even do a very good job of painting the sock anyway. You can still see the nasty yellow sweat stains on it... eeewwwww!
It was a goof. Funny. Old painter gag.
I once spray painted a medicine cabinet that was filled with personal care junk, bottles, vials, etc. Then I did the same with a full bookcase (after removing a few volumes). For the times it was considered artsy.
My wife wisely took the cat to her mother's.
Welcome to England.
All of the expats living here (be they French, Italian, Chinese or USA-ian) are always stunned and amazed at how rarely British workers truly complete a job correctly. Anything that's an important detail is always "someone else's job". I know plenty of people who won't hire Brits for anything, if they can help it.
They just don't get the concept of customer service here. But they will, as jobs start moving overseas or the jobs that don't become unmarketable on the world market.
Heh, painters are the same everywhere, I think. This is what happened recently near where I live.
There Will Always Be An England
"Took an astonishing short cut .."
You folks in the UK must be a bit short of 'Astonishments' if this is any indication.
I blame this sort of thing not on laziness or unions but on the Turner Prize.
If Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin had tied a sock to a post and pained over it Sotheby's would be overwhelmed with bidders.
You want to see shoddy workmanship we yanks will beat you hands down!
Ever driven a Ford or a Chevy?!
This reminds me of high school PE. There was a spot on the gym floor where the school builders varnished over a penny. We couldn't tell what date the penny was because it was tails up.
I am outraged : that's the poorest painting job I've ever seen done... on a sock!
J.
#20 Speak for yourself. As a true New England Yankee, we take pride in our work and craftsmanship.
Little did the township know that the sock was a marker to the 100 kilos of heroin in plastic bags in the water below..
#23 Fords and Chevys aren't made in a quaint wood working shop in Amherst by skilled artisans.
But then I guess you were referring to the Big Dig;)
This is less egregious an example, but still annoying: in my apartment, I know exactly at what angle the door was when it was last painted, thanks to the stripes on the rug.
I wonder if the sock is still there. Perhaps this could become some sort of monument, to which lazy people around the world could make pilgrimages.
Kathryn, I think I have a lowest-bidder-working-on-the-apartment-building story that you'll appreciate.
At the place we lived at a couple of years ago, the landlord decided to replace the carpets in the halls (after the superintendent suggested the ragged, tripping-hazard nature of the current carpet was a lawsuit risk), and hired the cheapest outfit. This turned out to be one dishevelled looking man, who:
- pulled off the baseboards and heaped them in the laundry room, with big rusty nails sticking ever which way
- ripped up the old carpet, rolled it up and heaped it next to the baseboards, and leaving all the spikeboards exposed, with their little metal spikes pointing upward, right in front of everyone's doors
- hurt his foot, got it infected, and from then on didn't feel up to working, so he sat in the laundry room smoking up (the place then smelled of dope and infected foot for days)
- got in a screaming fight with the superintendent over the pace of the work, decided he didn't need this nonsense, and was never seen again.
Things then stayed in exactly this state for months. Nobody in the building, including the super, had a truck, and the landlord wouldn't pay for one, so we couldn't even get rid of the mouldery old carpet and giant spiky mess of baseboards.
Finally a health inspector came by, doing a followup check on some minor issues with my apartment, first noted under previous tenants (unrepaired, of course), and noted all the additional ridiculousness that had developed since.
The landlord decided that I had called the health inspector out of personal vengeance against him, because he hadn't wanted me to put up a lawn-sign during a recent election (surprise, we didn't share political views). After I explained that I hadn't called them in, he figured that someone else in the building had, and wanted me to be his spy in the building, so he could "get them" in ways unspecified.
This fellow was also constantly taking down the notices of condemnation on the house next door and renting it back out without fixing the problems there. He managed to get away with all this, by his own explanation because of his considerable contributions of money and campaigning effort for the Alberta Conservative party...
To echo some of the other comments, this is pretty much standard for apartment living. When you move into a new place this is the kind of paint job you see. They paint over any gunk on the wall like leftover adhesive, holes, tape, dead bugs. And they splatter paint on the trim, etc.
Actually, I should say that the two landlords I had that only owned a couple of duplexes did a much better job than the landlords running many large apartment buildings.
Just Google "Not My Job" for more lazy examples
Maybe they used the sock to mask off something they did not want painted...
Maybe a light post mount like the one lined up directly in the back ground?
Naturally, as George Formby fans know, it's just a Little Piece of Blackpool Sock!
Everyone!
I actually like it as an art piece -- but if that was the intent, I hope they took the sock off, painted the rail under it, and reinstalled the painted sock. (Preferably after the rail had dried.)
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STPD STPD STPD PST
grandma always told let a single stained sock lie.
You know what is more sad than someone painting over a sock?
The fact that (if the article is to be believed) all these people, hotel managers, tourists, photographer(s?), city councilmen have apparently seen the the sock and no one has just simply taken the damn thing down.
#31 How could that possibly be the "smart/correct" thing.
It is possible that the painters were forbidden by union rules (or similar labor law) to remove the sock.
That sort of thing happened to me. I was forbidden (by union rules) to empty my own wastebasket. Got nailed for doing so.
In any case, the effort to paint the sock probably exceeded the effort to remove it. Must have been done on purpose ;)
If they could get nailed by union rules for removing a sock, surely they could also be nailed for painting a sock.
This reminds me of some people I worked with on the night crew at a warehouse store. They would spend so much time making products look like they were stocked up by stacking them up on the customer-facing side that they wouldn't take the time to actually pull down product and stock anything. Their aisles would look great for maybe the first hour we were open, but soon would need to be restocked by the day crew when it was more costly and inconvenienced customers.
That's not to say there weren't hard workers who did their jobs very well and worked smart. It's just there weren't enough of those people willing to work barely over minimum wage at night on the weekends to make a full crew. Did I mention I don't work there any more?
#25: Perhaps it already is. But then again, how many lazy pilgrims would you see, anyhow?
With the poor condition of most bridges around the world, this sock could be acting as a structural brace between two spans, and removing it might bring the whole bridge down.
You wanna answer for THAT then ? Not me..paint away, touch _nothing_.
Yeah, they whitewashed the walls in my school a couple years ago. And when I mean whitewashed, they made the walls COMPLETELY WHITE. Painting over bulletin boards, power outlets, coax plugs, intercoms, ventilation grills, radiators, etc...
"If they could get nailed by union rules for removing a sock, surely they could also be nailed for painting a sock."
Welcome to my working week!
Indeed, that sums up working life anywhere.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
"If they could get nailed by union rules for removing a sock, surely they could also be nailed for painting a sock."
And that's England in a nutshell, where anyone doing anything thinks first about the politics and potential for getting in trouble, rather than the work itself.
In other words, the simplest of activities turns into a Bureaucratic nightmare.
blame marcel duchamp...or commend him...does it matter?
#26,
Perhaps this could become some sort of monument, to which lazy people around the world could make pilgrimages.
Lazy...pilgrimage...I think this word does not mean what you think it means.
At the end of my first year of college, the school decided to remodel the dorms which was seriously needed. So the whole place was completely emptied out by the time we moved out.
The renovation included new carpets, furniture, paint... a whole over haul.
So after a long summer I stumble in with all my stuff, open the closet and was mystified by the lumpiness of shelf. I poked at it, and realized someone had left a bunch of ketchup packets, and the crews had painted right over them!
I left that shelf alone for the rest of year, it made a good conversation starter during parties!
In Brooklyn, road crews do the same thing when Raccoons die:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-liz/2861446907/
As a resident of Fleetwood (9 miles from Blackpool), this does not suprise me. Blackpool is a dump, has been for years.
A few years ago, I discovered that someone had methodically stuck a piece of chewing gum on each one of a row of wrought iron fenceposts next to my office in Edinburgh. There were over 300 dabs of gum there. They were so methodical that, when spikes were missing, they'd put a dab on the spot where they should have been.
Then my employer hired a company to prime and paint the fence. And, you guessed it, they primed and painted over all of the little globs of gum. They did a good job of it, too, unlike the sock painters, getting the paint right up under each glob.
welcome to the wonderful world of lazy feckless jobsworthism that is britain.
...Wanna take this one step further? Back in 1985, TXDoT was restriping a section of IH-35 near the Texas U campus. Apparently a cat had gotten run over and squashed flat by an 18-wheeler, and had become a flattened cat right on the line that divides the road from the side of the road. The paint crew drove their truck right over the cat and painted the line right over the flattened carcass!
...The next day, someone's car broke down, and while they were waiting for a wrecker they saw the dead cat with a yellow stripe painted right striaght up its back and across its skull. They called the local news services, who carried the story that evening. "Splat! The Cat" became the top story for about three weeks as everyone from TXDoT to the Governor were taken to task by everyone from concerned taxpayers to the ASPCA - who were actually trying to claim that the cat was still alive when the stripers painted over it!
...But that's not the punch line. The local "animal disposal" truck was sent out to scrape the cat up off the ground. However, they were given no instructions as to what to do about the fairly recognizeable outline of a cat left in the stripe! So for another two weeks all sorts of fur flew over who was supposed to go out and restripe over where the cat was formerly plastered. They finally got a truck out there to restripe, but only after the local gestapo started advising motorists who stopped for a look-see that they would be ticketed for causing a road hazard and interfering with traffic, and they actually issued some tickets to people who complained *really* loudly. All the tickets got tossed out by a judge, but it just goes to show you how stupid bureacracy can be when road worker idiocy goes before it.
I remember a story like this about reconstruction in Iraq. The contractors repainting a school (working for a chain of companies ultimately engaged by Halliburton) ruined the equipment in the science lab by painting it.
By the way, in Britain trades unions do not have the power to decide what tasks workers can and cannot do. All such 'restrictive practices' were prohibited during the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. In any case, the Blackpool workers probably don't belong to any union. Membership in trades unions has plummetted over recent decades. Only public sector bodies and large companies are likely to have a high level of union membership, and even then many employees won't belong to any union. ('Closed shops', where everyone must belong to the same union, are illegal here.)
If the national symbol of the United States of America were accurate, it would be this.
Now all we need is to make it into an image macro saying, "America, fuck yeah!"
Another meme in the making... are you listening SA goons?
Actually, make it a Despair demotivational poster, reading:
PRODUCTIVITY