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OK, who is the Masshole here?
By david_yamada on Wed, 01/14/2009 - 1:37pm
Given that I've preached about neighbors who don't clear their walks, I was taken aback this morning over this situation:
Although we cleared our sidewalk during the weekend snow storm and put down de-icer, yesterday the biggest melting snow pile caused a stream of water to flow towards the street, and last night it froze up, leaving about a 3-foot long patch of ice on our sidewalk.
Apparently one of our neighborhood dog owners took issue, this a.m. because not only did some unidentified pooch leave a couple of yellow snow markings on the snow pile alongside the sidewalk (okay, I can deal with that), but whoever picked up after said pooch left a plastic bag containing Fido's droppings sitting on top of the snow pile that caused the ice patch. Definitely trying to send a message there, yes?
Our triple decker condo unit does a decent job of keeping our sidewalk cleared (I'd give us a solid B to B+ on the whole), and while I felt bad about the ice patch, I thought that was a little over the top. Am I reading this right?
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Comments
Swirlygrl can you confirm
Swirlygrl can you confirm your location this morning?
Yep, sure can
until 7:45 - in bed
7:45 - 8:15 - making #2 son's lunch and getting ready for work
8:15-8:55 - DH's Family Limo service to Brooks School Medford and then via I-93 carpool lane to South Station area
8:55 - on: moving paper around my desk, drinking coffee, looking at graphs and spreadsheets and SAS code on computers located in Ireland, NJ, and Boston while gabbing, and other "officing" behaviors
okay...
...crossing SwirlyGrrl off the list.
At least until I check those JP CCTV neighborhood surveillance tapes. (It's not as liberal as you think here.)
Not owned by a dog, either
I guess I could send you some of the deer doots I found on my back lawn last night, though.
at least for a few minutes...
...they helped to melt the snow.
Someone sure seems to have
Someone sure seems to have their alibis lined up nicely. lol
maybe...
...too nicely. Hmmmm.
My evil clone
Well, maybe she has a dog, and didn't sleep in and bum a ride to work ... but I have no control over her.
I have to agree with you,
I have to agree with you, whoever did that was totally out of line. If they were walking their dog there this morning odds are they walked by your place the past few days there was nothing wrong with the sidewalks and what happened was not your fault at all. I can see if you have a huge patch of ice because you never shoveled, but something that small is pretty obivious that there was melting and refreezing, whoever did it was a total jerk and obiviously doesn't understand much about the concept of water thawing and freezing.
i think you may be reading
i think you may be reading into this. as a dog walker, i can testify that you can't really control where a dog is going to make its mark, so to speak. and perhaps the dog walker slipped and fell on the ice, and inadvertently left the bag? that seems more likely to me than the possibility of a very passive-aggressive vendetta. just my two cents!
Well....
...perhaps. But the ice patch was quite visible and not flat. And the doggie bag (not the kind I like) was put on top of the big snow pile. You'd actually have to stand on the ice patch and deliberately reach over to place the bag there. (I know, I sound like I've watched too much CSI, but this I figured out while putting down the de-icer.)
Snow makes dog walkers do
Snow makes dog walkers do strange things, nothing is worse than the soggy spring thaw uncovering soggy brown links all over your lawn.
Neither?
I'll grant that the bag leaver over-reacted. I'm as annoyed as anyone else with sidewalks being left in dangerous conditions, but I also get what happens when snow melt is flash frozen and the timeframe of that. Unless I knew the property owner to be regularly negligible, I would cut them some slack. That said, if I had slipped on that patch of ice, I might be more upset by it and less rational, and that seems like a possibility. They might not have dropped the bag during the fall, but may have left it in anger after the fall. It wouldn't be fair, but just as one ought to cut the home owner slack in that case, it might also be worth giving the pedestrian the benefit of the doubt and cut them some slack, too.
Maybe not
Maybe it didn't have anything to do with the ice. Maybe the person who left that bag was just being a slob.
Not in Boston, no!
Insensitive dog owner in Boston?? Naaah, never happens.
to be a dog
A lot of people are very stressed out right now.
At least the doggies can do their business as they please.
passive aggressive messaging with a glad bag of dog shit
The dog owner is passive aggressive and has no reasonable motive for leaving their dogshit on the snow pile outside your home. Leave it there. It's theirs to cleanup.
That said, I'm sure you would find a better place to pile the snow if you could, given that when snow piled in that location melts, it causes a hazard.
By the way, my understanding is that a natural accumulation of snow cannot cause a liability, but an accumulation created by people moving it about can cause a liability for the property owner if someone has an accident as a result. True?
where to put it (the snow I mean)
Actually, the question of where to put shoveled snow is vexing when the only locations are those that tilt downhill and naturally will melt over the sidewalk.
I'm sure that already this winter, many of us have looked around and wondered, where the hell are we supposed to put this stuff???
I think it all boils down to homeowners making a good faith effort to clear snow and ice and pedestrians watching their steps while cutting people some reasonable slack when there's been a bad storm. The Golden Rule, good neighborly practices, and so on.
I believe it was the late
I believe it was the late 90's when one year we got hit by three large storms within 2 weeks of each other and there wasnt a chance for the snow to melt in between. I remember living on a side street and not being able to figure out where to put all the snow (as the teenage buy in the house I was in charge of snow removal procedures for all 3 cars and the property, along with snow removal for a few neighbors who paid well.) I remember there being vertical snow piles all down the street almost 5 feet tall of packed snow, and spaces being carved out of these snow banks, and all the trees being buried in snow. I remember I ultimatly had to call in friends who helped me load garbage cans full of snow, we would sled them down the street to an open field (that is now condos) and would dump the snow into the field, it took us a few hours but we had the cleanest area around. I can only imagine what it must have been like in congested areas like where you must live, even over at my parents place it would be hard now because all open space has been used for buildings.
That sounds fun!
In Minnesota they haul the snow away in trucks. I like your way better!
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
I meant to say boy not buy
I meant to say boy not buy lol
My way works great if you have loads of teenage energy and a place to dump all th snow! Otherwise Im down with trucking it out. Someone told me once that the airport has snow melting machine it uses in case of massive amounts of snow.
windy city
That story reminds me of growing up in NW Indiana, and we'd get the "lake effect" (as in Lake Michigan) snowstorms, and the white stuff would be piled so high it was a winter wonderland if you were a little kid!
Anyway, tonight I tried to hack away at the ice patch, with only modest success. I must've poured a quart of de-icer over the area. This stuff is stubborn. I hope we don't get another "gift" in the morning.