On the Dot...

The pool featured in this picture, showing the junction between Kananea and Muskatell streets in Attard, is not the result of a heavy downpour. Periodically someone living in the area pumps water into the street and because of the bad levelling of the road surface the water collects at the junction. On complaining with the local council office, a resident was told that though they would be addressing the road surface problem in the near (!) future they could do nothing about clean water being thrown out, even though it could be a nuisance to residents in the area. Additionally they could not send anyone from the office to catch the person red-handed because they worked till 3 p.m.!

Bosom Friends

The statistics that were seen and heard in the media during Breast Care Awareness Week are indeed food for thought. Whereas it is a well-known fact that early detection may mean a potentially curable condition, the fact remains that many women - and men - do not bother to self-test, even when they belong to high-risk groups. How about a drive promoting random testing?

Taking the Pulse

Sixth form students are receiving flyers at home, encouraging them to vote for a particular students' organisation in their school. One wonders through which data banks the students' addresses were obtained; after all, some of them have never attended any type of meeting or put their name down for anything, other than the obligatory times at the beginning of the scholastic year.

Stand and Deliver

Sometimes, school buses fail to pick up their charges on time, wreaking havoc in everyone else's timetables, without informing parents of the delay. It is to be noted that not many drivers carry a list of passengers usually in their charge. Therefore, if an accident or delay does happen, parents may not be informed of it soon enough.

Poor Communications

Munxar local council lacks communications with its citizens. Lately works for resurfacing the roads within Munxar housing estate began but residents came to know about the works only from the heavy machinery and rubble present.

Teacher's Mentality

Despite the safety precautions taken by schools to protect teachers from outsiders with malicious intent, an educator from the Birkirkara school caught the short end of the stick. Representatives of schools attending seminars may be told that CCTV cameras will anticipate such attacks; however, it is a moot point whether help will be forthcoming at that moment, and by whom.

Care Orders

Other workers who do not receive adequate police protection, and are sometimes injured in the course of duty, are journalists. More than any other section of the working body, they are attacked for speaking their mind, or merely doing their job when reporting incidents.

Bottle Holders

Not many people using the bring-in recycling sites are likely to pour hot water into plastic bottles and other containers to have them shrink. People could even squash them. At the Qui-Si-Sana waste collection area, even old tyres are discarded, only to be thrown across the street by jaded youngsters out for some fun. The boxes could do with being emptied more often.

Doggerel

A huge dog is taken for its daily walk around certain blocks in Hamrun. However, in a manner of speaking, it uncannily always picks the same places to dirty. Residents of High Street, in the stretch between Barbara Street and St Mary Street, are quite irked at the behaviour of this animal and its owner.

Special Deliveries

Workers under private contract to collect domestic refuse, who dump all of one street's bags in the middle of its junction with another, are hardly likely to care about four separate bags of rubbish from one household - garbage that would have been sorted at source. One notes moreover that although these workers have started wearing their fluorescent tabards, they are nowhere near wearing safety gloves, well-fitting footwear, and, perhaps, gauze masks.