GOLD MEDAL JOBSWORTH

And today’s gold medal for completely and utterly useless jobsworthiness goes to West Sussex County Council.

 

Effing Useless!

So why are they top of the podium in this new Olympic sport of bureaucratic uselessness?  Because of their lack of interest in making any kind of effort to resolve an issue affecting some of their residents.

Being a civic minded citizen, I dropped the WSCC a line to find out if there was any chance the tree planted in the verge could be pruned down a bit as it is not only taking a lot of light from our upstairs bedroom but I’m also fed up of hearing next door complain about it.

 

How big does it need to be?

A council employee rang to inform me that: 

-   -  WSCC don’t prune trees to give people more light
-  The tree isn't big enough to be deemed a nuisance (really?)
-  They don’t have the budget to prune trees
-  They are only concentrating on remedying safety issues
-  It’s a healthy tree
-  It doesn’t look like branches are going to fall off it anytime soon
-  I can prune bits overhanging my boundary fence if I want to but not madly

In essence, they are not going to do anything because it might involve someone getting off their arse to do something about it and it’s not as if we’re paying enough in council tax anyway.

I mean it’s not like I wanted it chopped down completely because after all it is a lovely tree.  All it needs is a short back and sides to tidy it up but as it’s not our tree then we can’t actually get anyone in to do this ourselves. 

Thus dear readers if you are faced with the same scenario my advice is to not bother contacting your local authority because your issue will be treated like a leaf stuck to the bottom of a shoe, wiped against the bureaucratic doormat of inactivity. 

I’m hoping that eventually the tree will get struck by lightning or a falling meteor, develop a tree-based form of Covid or get knocked down by a psycho supermarket delivery driver when dropping off shopping.  In the meantime, I guess we’ll just have to learn to live with it.