Etc.

Uh, boss, you need to see this

Cancel the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Apparently, it will be quite a while before subway trains can roll through the new tunnel built for them in Poland's capital, Warsaw. Why? Well, there's a small problem with the structure that contractors finished building recently. Emphasis on small.

According to news accounts, inspectors assigned to make sure that the costly project was up to code in every respect came up with an embarrassing discovery: The roof is so low that cars on the rapid transit system won't fit under it. Or, as the spokesman for Polish Railways put it: "Tracks were laid on newly raised ground, which meant the distance between them and the roof became shorter."

This might have been avoided, except that there was little or no communication between the crew building the tunnel and the guys laying the rails. No word yet on whether the project is going to have to be ripped out and started anew or whether the Metro system will go shopping for lower cars.

Alas, this is just the latest incident of its type in the city. A new tunnel especially for truck traffic also turned out to be too low. And last year, the national highway authority was all set to unveil plans for a new expressway only to discover that two of its sections would have missed each other. Each would have come to a dead end out in the countryside, five miles apart.