If you live in Joburg, and you drive around at all, I’m sure you’ve noticed that our roads are increasingly becoming littered with little runnels tracking across the city. If you haven’t, you either don’t leave home much or you live in some remote dorpie where smoke signals are still used for communication (in which case I have no idea how you’re reading this). To the best of my knowledge these little ditches are caused by Neotel doing their thing laying fibre everywhere. In my opinion the actual process hasn’t been too disruptive; in general I’ve noticed they have been dug and the fibre pulled within a day or two.

However, It’s a good thing we haven’t had too much rain lately because I’m sure some of these runnels would have become veritable canyons by now. As it is, many of them are increasingly nearing the level of outright road-hazard that desperately need to be filled in. I actually managed to slide both wheels over one of these things on my bike; though that was mostly due to the giant sand dune that had been piled on top.

Similarly there is now a nice ditch cut out of the road on my daily route. And by nice, I mean, bloody huge. It’s probably about 3″ deep now and about the width of an average sized car wheel. In other words, if you hit that thing at a decent speed, you’re likely to pop some tyres and buckle your rims. I’m just glad I saw them cutting it a week ago otherwise I would probably be buying 2 new tyres about now.