Idiots

I'm still waiting for a reply to this letter. It will be interesting to see what the Fire Brigade has to say.

Mr Greg Mullins

Commissioner

NSW Fire Brigades

Dear Commissioner:

At approximately 0730hrs on Friday 7 April 2006, myself and another cyclist almost became road death statistics when one of your big, red shiny trucks failed to give way at a roundabout behind Darling Harbour. The location in question is the roundabout at the intersection of Darling Drive and Pier Street. The photo below shows the intersection. Note the lovely, new fresh green paint that the Darling Harbour Authority has so thoughtfully applied to the road surface to mark the cycle lane. The paint is so fresh, you can almost smell it.

Thankfully, I managed to get around your big red appliance – otherwise, your crew would have been hosing my blood and skin off this lovely green paint. The Darling Harbour Authority has put a lot of time and effort into painting the road this lovely green colour, and I would prefer to leave it (and my skin) in pristine condition. Personally, I am not in favour of the shade, as it does not match the surrounding trees, but then I guess that’s the point. Unless you are completely colour blind, it should stick out like dogs balls to the average driver. It should stand out even more to the driver of a big, red shiny bike-squasher who is seated at least a metre higher than your average car, and thus has a much better view of the road ahead.

That is, unless you have been implementing some sort of gender balanced, height unrestricted, non-discriminatory hiring policy and you have been appointing short sighted, colour blind dwarves as engine drivers. If so, might I suggest that you dip into your budget and fund some cushions for them to sit on and a few pair of glasses.

If you aren’t employing dwarves, there could be some other explanations for why your driver decided it was time to take out some non-motorised commuters.

1. Given that it was 0730hrs, the boys were probably feeling a big peckish and had heard over the radio that the hot cross buns had just come out of the oven back at the station. I’d have to agree that there is nothing worse than a hot cross bun that has gone cold – they’re just not the same if the butter can’t melt into the bun. Re-heating a hot cross bun once it has been heated once is just not on. Personally, I’d be driving like Sandra Bullock in “Speed” if I had a crew of guys in the back with the munchies and we’d just heard that the buns were on. Obviously, you have not employed Sandra Bullock, and a deranged maniac had not planted a bomb on this particular appliance as it did not explode when it came to a halt. Otherwise, I would be writing this covered in hairy gibbets of macerated dwarf.

2. Maybe the boys just aren’t getting enough play time with the jaws of life and all the other fun “scrap the car, Clyde” type tools. I read this week that car fatalities are up 25% in NSW this year on last, so perhaps your boys thought they needed some practice in order to improve their victim extraction times. Or, all the crashes are happening outside of their patch, and they feel that they are missing out on chopping cars into teeny little bits. I hate to point it out to you, but the jaws of life are a bit of a waste of time when it comes to bicycles. It’s pretty hard to get trapped underneath the handle bars – unless you have the front wheel of a big, red 10 tonne fire truck resting on your chest.

3. The driver had the sun in his eyes. Sorry, the sun rises in the east, and he was driving west. Yes I know that the time change with daylight saving has messed with a lot of peoples heads, but the delayed changeover after the Commonwealth Games has not reversed the rotation of the Earth. Nor have we moved our clocks forward 10 hours so that 0730hrs is actually dusk, in which case the sun would have been setting in the eyes of your driver.

4. Your driver is a flaming idiot that should not have been given the keys to a Tonka truck, let alone a big expensive shiny red appliance. He might be very good at running up stairs with a hose over his shoulder and kicking in doors and kissing plastic dummies, but he seems to have collected his license from a Weeties packet. Either that, or Coles are handing them out with the hot cross buns this year. If he wants to go blasting through roundabouts without giving way, by all means do so, but turn on the shiny red spinning disco lights on the roof, and crank up the thing that goes ‘woo-woo-woo’ really loudly. I’m sure you know what I am talking about – I just can’t think of the technical term at the moment as I am still in complete shock at how fortunate I am to have missed the Grim Reaper on this occasion.

That being said, I guess if you are going to get hit by something large and heavy, the two best alternatives are an Ambulance and then a fire truck. Hopefully, there will be someone on board who would know what to do next. However, given the way you lot drive, the crew would probably leap out and go, “Look he is all red – he must be on fire. Pull out the 2 inch nozzle and hose him down”.

Sincerely,

PS – would you have to space the rungs on your ladders more closely together if you employed dwarves?