The day in sidewalk futility

Today, while waiting at a stop light, I watched a man outside of Bauhaus attempting to staple poster to a pole. A metal pole. Poor guy, just banging away at that metal pole. Initially my thought was to give him the benefit of the doubt, after all those poles are always plastered with the bills of events past which could make determining what substrate one is dealing with difficult, and my vantage as driver might have given me an advantage at making that determination. Or perhaps he had some sort of super-staples capable of penetrating metal. But as I watched him hopelessly bludgeon the pole, then examine his stapler to see if it's jammed, then continue to wale away, I simply thought that for someone who makes a living by attaching paper to poles, his ability to discern a metal pole from a wooden one is pathetically under-honed.