dummy World War II tank
We’ve also suffered from road construction, sidewalk repairs, etc. that turn major mult-lane roads into one lane with barely moving cars. You know in your hearts that these road-repair companies (RRCs) could complete their jobs in a month. But they don’t. They let the job linger for a year or more.
Why do they do this? They’re petrified of having no job or projects. So they bid on and win several projects. They haven’t the manpower to finish all the projects at once. So they move their few crews from one site to another. This means that most projects will not have crews working on them. But it looks bad, if the RRC doesn’t even pretend to work on a site.
What do they do then? They park backhoes, steamrollers, and other big truck at the unattended road repairs. And they leave there and they leave them there and they leave them there. Doesn’t it cost the RRC a lot of money to buy enough big trucks to leave at seventeen unworked sites?
Yes, it does! This is where my brilliant ideas comes in. The RRC contacts a firm that makes bouncy castles and asks them to fabricate inflatable construction vehicles. (The allies built dummy tanks during World War II to fool the Germans.) Similarly, the RRC then leaves their dummy construction trucks at their unworked sites. An inflatable steamroller would cost ever so much less than a real one and it looks real to the bored drivers crawling past them for fourteenth month. The RRC will save a fortune.
This idea is easy, even if getting the RRC to finish a job is not.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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