What possesses people in Toronto to do the things they do the way they do them?
Tilt!
Do people not notice the substandard quality of work in this city? Or, if they notice, do they simply not care? “Excellence” long forgotten, “good enough” now well out of reach, too.
File under: Hopelessly Broken City
4 comments
That’s hilarious–I saw this on my way home from work and thought to myself “What the hell?” Honestly, we’re surrounded with enough Christmas rubbish to light Las Vegas and this is the best we can do for a menorah? It’s what I would expect to see outside an Israeli crackhouse.
I don’t know why Torontonians don’t have some kind of uprising over the sheer crappiness of even the most ordinary things. It makes you wonder how bad things have to get before people open their eyes and shake the shit out of their heads.
Jeez.
I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, David, and I think this is how it happens: people in Toronto imagine some pre-determined amount of time they want to spend doing something, whether it’s putting up a menorah or stringing lights on
Christmasholiday trees or even waiting at a stop sign, and when that time has passed, they move on, whether it’s been completed appropriately or not. For real. I’ve been walking across an intersection and drivers actually start moving through the stop sign into pedestrians. “I’ve been waiting long enough!”We’re a very busy city. It’s one thing to be too busy to catch all the details, but when the fundamentals are missed, too, it’s time to rethink whether a task is worth doing at all.
That’s entirely plausible, though I wonder whose idea it was to dedicate 7.4 minutes to erecting that menorah. If I was Jewish, and I cared at all, I would be outraged.
And, having been to a few other large cities around the world, I think I can say that the main thing Torontonians are busy with is self-importance. Count on us to strive for a world-class busyness without any actual purpose to back it up.
I’m not a big fan of the suburbs but I’m starting to see why people flee to them at the end of the day.
[...] Toronto Way is not limited to badly-erected menorahs. Oh, no. In Toronto, if you need to park you just… park. Anywhere you damn well please. A [...]