Eavesdropping - again

From time to time I'll overhear something on the bus that piques my interest. 98% of the generally one sided conversations that you hear are as inane as listening to someone reading out a shopping list or describing how to disassemble a carburetor. But when a couple of feral looking teenagers sit down in front of you, it's time to perk up and listen in. That might seem nosy, but the volume that they interact at means that generally anyone sitting on the bus next door would be able to hear them, even if they were wearing a set of noise reducing headphones.

The latest pair to deafen all and sundry in the vicinity were on their way to the Five Dock Park skate ramp. I was coming home from work early, and it was a school day, yet they were on the bus at 1pm. From the content of their chatter, I discovered that they should have been at school, but their attendance was patchy at best.

After a few minutes of talking about vandalising this and that, they moved on to complaining about a certain pole in the skate park. According to them, the pole is placed in such a way to inhibit certain manouveres, much to their annoyance and distaste.

After describing the stupidity of the pole, they then started discussing ways and means of removing it - sawing it off with a hacksaw, bending it back and forth until it snapped at the base and finally angle grinding the stump out of the concrete.

Clearly, the two of them were incapable of actually doing any of this - it was just wishful thinking on their behalf. I felt like leaning over the seat and telling them how to contact Council and how to make a request to have the pole removed - but then they started talking about wrecking private property with spray paint, so I left them to stew in their discontent, happy in knowing that their skating will forever be marred by that pole.

I'm sure Council would remove said pole if a reasonable case for its amputation was made via the proper channels - the proper channels being sending an email to the address which can be found on the Council website, or phoning the number listed on the Council website, or writing a letter to Council. However, such simple actions seemed to be far beyond their ken - particularly the task of writing a legible and comprehensible request.

And that's just tough.