Friday, May 7, 2010

Mack sees Bell


This particular cement truck is often to be found on Preston Street. Mr Simpson on the front grill makes the truck distinctive. When walking on West Wellie near Holland, I met him there too. Busy man.

He is going to continue to be a familiar sight on Preston near Primrose. Bell has decided that since the street has been reconstructed, the sidewalks put in place, the landscaping done ... they are now going to dig up the above intersection and put in an underground vault or chamber. Not content with digging up the corner for three weeks, they are then going to dig up another block of Preston to run new underground cables ducts to Elm Street.

It's enough to make one cry. Except that my shares in Bell went up in value. It's hard to figure out why.

7 comments:

  1. Wondering if this news item might be part of the reason for your share prices going up, along with the temperatures of any number of Net users across Canada:

    http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/05/06/crtc-usage-based-billing-internet.html

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  2. I wonder if this will mean we can get Bell's fancy new Fibe internet package around here...

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  3. Matt: I talked to the onsite construction workers yesterday. They said the work was to install new higher speed fibre optic cables.
    -Eric

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  4. Yesterday, I went out for my walk, and at the corner of Preston and Primrose, was confronted by a backhoe smashing through the recently finished new concrete landscaping, and a dump truck taking all that new concrete debris away!
    I stood there, as the English put it, gobsmaked, with my mouth open! I couldn't believe what was happening! The city had just finished putting in all that new landscaping! Like you, I felt like crying. What a waste! And more traffic inconvenience and noise for everyone in our neighbourhood.
    So this morning, I thought, why don't I check out your West Side Action blog. Maybe Eric has found out what is going on. And you did!
    So the guilty party is our "good" corporate citizen, Bell Canada. Wouldn't you know it.
    Thanks again very much for putting the information onto your very valuable blog. I can't imagine how long it would have taken for a "civilian" like me to have called the city and then Bell to find out what that contractor was up to -after all, the backhoe and truck had no company names to identify them -like the city or Bell logos - to indicate who they are working for.
    I even thought that like a botched surgical operation on a human, maybe the contractor was destroying the wrong corner -after all, we all thought the work was all finished by now. Oh naive us.

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  5. dear walker: on your next stroll, go down Preston to Spruce, and see what the gas company is up to. They had a landscaping firm remove the trees and shrubs (better than Bell) and dug up 40' of Preston sidwalk to install a new gas valve. Why couldn't Bell and Enbridge do this last year?

    As for the third digging up exercise, I plead guilty to contributing to the cause of that. At the NE corner of Spruce, the City has dug up the new sidwalk to relocate the fire hydrant. Throughout the planning process, we nagged the city to move it to the bulb out so it wouldn't cut out a parking space. They didn't relocate it during the construction, but after a blast from me earlier this spring, presto it moved. I was, what is the term, gobsmacked that they actually did it. Wonders never cease.

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  6. hey my cement truck lol

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