Painting poles

At a nearby intersection, just a couple of blocks up from my house, the Cape Town Municipality (Durbanville division) is in the process of converting a four-way stop into a traffic-light controlled street crossing. This morning, as I finished off the school run and headed back to the safety of my piles, I mean housework, I rode through this intersection and happened to notice a forlorn figure applying regulation yellow paint to the already erected traffic light posts. He had no face. Just a lot of hair poking out of the hood of his standard-issue street-worker's uniform. Also, he was quite short, and the jacket he was wearing wasn't, so the roller he was using to apply the paint to the pole, half disappeared up his sleeve, where, I presume, it was being firmly clutched in a small and hirsute hand.

It looked like tedious work. The paint roller wasn't very big, and the painter did not have a ladder or anything else to stand on. When I realised this, I took a quick scan around the intersection and noticed that 2 of the relevant 4 traffic lights had already received attention from the hairball with the yellow roller. Only, the top third of each pole was a miserable grey in comparison to the bright yellow coat of freshly applied paint that covered the lower two thirds of each traffic light pole. 

What made them allocate the painting of the poles to the shortest employee is beyond me. In fact, what made them decide to paint the posts only AFTER they set them up is a greater mystery. At the risk of sounding decidedly feminist, I'm almost certain that if a woman had been in charge of this spot of town planning, the traffic lights would have been neatly painted the day before assembly, when all parts of each pole could be easily reached.

What is it with men and erections anyhow?

The scene at the intersection brought Dr Suess's delightful rhyme about being lucky into mind. He spoke about "poor Ali Sard who has to mow grass in his uncle's back yard. And it's quick-growing grass and it grows as he mows it. The faster he mows it, the faster he grows it. And all that his stingy old uncle will pay for his shoving that mower around in that hay is the piffulous pay of two Dooklas a day. And Ali can't live on such piffulous pay! SO... he has to paint flagpoles on Sundays in Grooz. How lucky you are you don't live in his shoes!"

I trust the bewhiskered, brush-weilding breadwinner begets better wealth than poor Ali Sard.