Foxcrawl

An employee of the Moscow municipality lost his job after clearing the snow off the streets of the Russian capital using a unique tool : PHOTOSHOP. (scroll down for photo)

Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin dismissed a subordinate responsible with a district where the street snow was shoveled away with the famed image editing program.

Leonid Bogatyryov, the administration chief of the Orekhovo-Borisovo district in Moscow wanted to ease his office duties by means of a genuine trick, but the effort cost him his job.

How did it happen? Well, at the end of January Russian blogger Yuri Ursu (“yuriursu”) submitted a complained to Moscow’s government website “Nash Gorod” (Our City) about a narrow passage that had never been cleaned this winter. Following the complaint, Bogatyryov started working conscientiously on the “troubling area”. Not on the street as you would have expected, but behind the computer.

Two days later, on February 1, the blogger received a message signed by the head of the administration, which stated that the street was cleaned, and the company responsible for the cleaning was sanctioned. The message was accompanied also by a photograph, showing the result of work that was carried out: the snow had disappeared and along with it also the inscriptions on the walls but the pavement showed visible traces left by the photoshop’s “brush”.

Ursu forwarded the response to the city government office and the local prosecutors office.

Photoshop job: In Moscow, snow is removed from streets with famous image editor software