https://doctorow.medium.com/weak-institutions-a26a20927b27
I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.
— Boss Tweed.
"Around 2010, I had a problem. My kid was just turning two, and finally
starting to sleep through the night, which was a blessing, but then a
mysterious company bought the building next door to our east London flat.
The building next door had been sitting empty for years, ever since a safety
inspection determined that a) it was full of asbestos and b) it lacked a
fire-exit. Either one of these made the building unfit for commercial or
residential use, and the long-term tenants had moved into other office
buildings in the neighborhood.
So it was a surprise when a new company moved in and put up signs advertising
the building as the coming site of a hotel. The surprise turned to dismay as
the new owners set to renovating their new digs, working exclusively between 10
p.m. and four a.m., drilling, jackhammering and sawing on the party-wall that
ran along both our bedroom and our two-year-old’s bedroom.
Hackney — our local council — was worse than useless. They had two
noise-control officers, and if you had someone e.g. jackhammering on the wall
next to your bed, all night, every night, for weeks on end, all you could do
was leave a message on what I
swear was a literal answering machine, complete
with tape-hiss, and if they got the message and showed up to the site and
determined that things were too noisy, they would “caution” the noisemaker.
If that didn’t end the noise-torture, you could start leaving messages again,
and if they caught the miscreants jackhammering next to your bed at three a.m.
again, they could
take away the jackhammer.
It never came to that because the noise officers never caught these guys in the
act. I’d call them every night at 10 p.m., leave a message, and then they would
just not show up. A couple times, they arrived at 5 or 6 in the morning, after
the jackhammering had finally stopped, and they’d shrug and explain that they
were very busy, but keep leaving messages and they’d get around to
it…eventually."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
