Life never fails to amaze me. Here we are — fiscally engaged members of our community, concerned about the economic well-being of our country. We worry about productivity and our government’s ability to attack the issue. We bemoan our crumbling infrastructure.

Let me tell you, my personal productivity would improve greatly if the city wasn’t so busy fixing our crumbling infrastructure.

It starts the minute I drive out of our laneway. As part of the City of Toronto 2006 Capital Construction Program, numerous men wearing hard hats are reconstructing the “300-mm watermain and appurtenances” on our street.

That means pipes and connectors and big machines used to dig up the street are parked where the cars used to go. Every morning a huge dump trunk arrives, the noise level increases and the ability to navigate our street decreases. Whether I am on my way to walk the dogs or heading for the office, everything takes longer.

And it must be playing havoc with the productivity of a number of men in our neighbourhood who work at home. Recently, the men in hard hats dug through the existing watermain. By the time I got home, the closest fire hydrant was pouring water into the street — which looked more like a country creek than a street — and there was no water at any house on the block.

That mishap required hours of attention from the neighbourhood men. My husband finally went out to find out how long it would be before the water was back on and didn’t come back for an hour. It must have required lengthy and in-depth analysis; I noticed several men, with and without hard hats, deep in discussion at the end of the street.

In fact, we fear one of the neighbourhood men may have unwittingly occasioned the mishap. It seems when he walked by with his dog, the hard-hatted man marking the street with his spray can stopped to chat. We suspect he forgot to spray the appropriate “do not dig here” symbol on the street.

That is just the beginning. My favourite route to the office along Mount Pleasant Road is down to one lane because more men in hard hats are resurfacing the bridge. I have been investigating alternative routes — as has everyone else who used that route to drive north.

Again, not good for personal productivity, I am spending more time in my car and less time at my desk. But judging by the amount of traffic clogging our roadways, three-quarters of the city shares my plight.

Then there is the route my daughter and I usually take from our early-morning hockey games to the office. We play pickup hockey from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Monday mornings at an arena in the northwest part of the city. Afterward, we shoot straight across Sheppard Avenue to arrive at the office a little after nine.

Or we used to. It seems a broken watermain caused the road to sink into the ground and, because they were worried about the safety of a nearby bridge, that whole section of Sheppard is closed. Once again, we are testing alternate routes — along with everyone else —and I am arriving at the office at 9:30 a.m. Another half an hour of my life, lost to negotiating Toronto traffic.

So what are we to do? On a micro level, to maintain personal productivity levels, I have less personal time, which means less sleep. And my grumpy moods no doubt inhibit the productivity of my co-workers.

On a macro level, perhaps modern cities such as Toronto aren’t conducive to productivity. We have lost the ability to work where we live. We have lost control of our time. IE