But, did he say that they only had 3 shovels, so what with cutbacks, the men would have to lean on each other...

Or that he gave them 3 shovels and said "take your pick" and confused them.

Hopefully none of them smoke on the job!

It's formally called "inter-agency working"....the road digging guys(1) start when the highway folk (2) have finished doing their cones and the traffic management(3) geezers have installed nicely inconvenient and unnecessarily long lights. Then ,after the roads have been drilled and dug, the gas people arrive(4) . Doubtless there are several gas special;ists invloved here with each having their work tested by an off site supervisor -who is marking progress and inspecting as and when it is convenient for him.

Most site work begins at 08.00 and finshes at 16.00. In reality this means an arrival time of around 07.35 and a clear up by 15.15. No work during any kind of unusual weather, none at weekends of course and absolutely no circumstances permit nightwork unless an emergency is evident .

One of the many problems we have as a nation is that, whilst we are world-renowned for problem-solving and creativity, we are equally 'great' at bureaucracy and waste - mostly solving great problems we created by our incompetence in the first place. We are, these days at least, useless at organisation, efficient use of resources and teamwork, and include politics and corner-cutting within the workplace then you get a wonderful mix of anti-competitive practices.

Not that long ago, I left my job, and hopefully my career in Construction - it has all the wonderful 'qualities' I described above, and one of the reasons why I decided to jack it in. Remember that 'Heineken' advert about a road works crew wondering whether they can do lot of different jobs at the same time to make things easier - we all laughed when it was on, but like a lot of funny things, its perfectly true.

Of course, as regards road work, it doesn't help that councils spend diddly-squat on the supervision and planning of such work - its bad enough that they put up way too many road humps, signs and other street furniture, but then, as others have described don't have the money to maintain them effectively, but many are poorly designed, installed in an inappropriate place (signs and drains in particular) and the timing, length and quality of road repairs mostly causes huge traffic jams.

How often have you see a utility firm wait ages to repair a major fault such as a water main or power fault (the street lights weren't working for over 6 months, and the council can't legally do anything to push them to fix it), and the road works as described either take ages because of the delays between stages or not enough/lazy operatives, or the do a p**s poor job and have to come back again (quite common), or do so JUST AFTER the local council has spent £000ks on properly resufacing the road, thus introducing areas where the road can easily break up quaickly in poor weather and wasting council money both at the original replacement and subsequent repairs, which have to be undertaken sooner than can be afforded.