Potholes are the garbage of roads. But they’re also the bane of the existence of drivers in Panama City, a gleaming metropolis of skyscrapers and beauty, which was so busy building all of it that it forgot about its actual roads. One company sought to change that, by having the potholes tweet about it every time a tire went in.
The thinking behind it involved dropping a motion and pressure sensor into what looks like a hockey puck, dropping it in the pothole, and then having it tweet using a transmitter when someone new just risked busting a wheel.
Each tweet is sent directly to the twitter account Panamanian department of public works, making sure that they hear nothing but guff from potholes all day whining about their very state of existence. At the same time, P4 Ogilvy & Mather, the ad company behind the idea, also teamed up with local television news show Telemetro Reporta to get locals in on it to berate their city government.
Just to make sure they got the message.
The Twitter account, @Elhuecotwitero, is still going strong, and in between bemoaning the physical geography of Panama City it also posts poetic laments about its own state of being:
“On nights like this,” it roughly translates to, “when I observe the moon and I see the lunar craters, I am reminded that I am but a simple hole :(”
:(
[Quartz]
Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
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