I often wonder what the City of Winnipeg thinks of its citizens. After all, they don’t have a problem tearing up their roads and leaving them to collect dust for months on end. And yesterday we had yet more evidence that the City could care less what people think.

I arrived to work to an email message saying that our water (downtown, in an office building) would be turned of in one hour for the rest of the day. When told of this I asked, “has anyone asked the City why they didn’t do this on the weekend when there was nobody here?” I was told it was a water main break. Turning off the water to a major office building for a whole day on the Tuesday after a long weekend still seemed a bit much.

Low and behold, about an hour later an email arrived indicating the City wasn’t going to turn the water off until they were ready to dig, and then it would only be off for about 1 1/2 hours. They would be done by 4pm.

Of course this begs the question: Was the City’s original intention to turn the water of even though they didn’t need to? And if this was such an emergency, how is it that they were able to sit on their thumbs for 7 hours?

Obviously someone from one of the more assertive organizations in the building (not mine) called their bluff. But why did anyone need to call their bluff? Who makes these decisions at the City? And when can we have them fired? Really. It’s bad enough that people think we are a second class city. Do we really have to work so hard to prove it?