Unwanted Municipal Services

Municipal Grass-Cutting Team Arrives During Exact Moment Every Resident Is on a Zoom Call

A municipal grass-cutting team deployed to a residential area in the Helderberg this week demonstrated a precision of timing that, if applied to any of the area’s other municipal operations, would represent a significant service improvement but which in its current application has resulted in twelve simultaneous Zoom calls being derailed, three work-from-home residents being asked by colleagues whether they are “all right over there” and one man who was presenting to a client in Johannesburg having to explain, in real time, what a municipal brush cutter sounds like up close.

The team arrived at 9h53 on a Tuesday, which is during what a survey of the affected street would reveal to be the densest concentration of online meetings in the working week. A single large petrol-powered brush cutter was operated along the verge directly outside four consecutive properties at sustained full throttle for a period of approximately forty-five minutes, producing a noise level that one affected resident measured on her phone at 94 decibels and which registered on Zoom as “background audio issue” before the platform muted her automatically and sent her a notification to that effect.

“I was mid-sentence in a quarterly review,” one resident reported. “Not a casual call. A formal review with senior stakeholders in two cities. The brush cutter started and I had about two seconds to decide whether to explain it or pretend it wasn’t happening. I chose to explain it. I said it was municipal maintenance. My director said it sounded like someone was operating a helicopter in my lounge. I said it was quite close. She did not seem satisfied with this.”

A second resident who had taken a call in her car to avoid the noise found that the team had moved along the street by the time she returned, at which point a leaf blower, previously unannounced, began operating outside her front door. A third resident muted himself throughout his call and communicated via the chat function for twenty-two minutes, which his team found “efficient, actually and something he should consider more often.”

The grass was cut well. The verge, which had become genuinely untidy over the preceding months, looks considerably better. Several residents who were not on Zoom calls at the time describe the outcome as “a long time coming and worth it.” The residents who were on Zoom calls share this view about the outcome and have no view they are prepared to express publicly about the timing.

The municipality has not responded to queries about scheduling. The grass will need cutting again in approximately six weeks. Residents with standing Tuesday morning meetings are monitoring the calendar.