The job of a public works crew in springtime is much more than merely riding the roads and tossing cold patch into potholes that will become even bigger potholes a couple of days later.

There’s an element of futility to such a task, knowing that all your hard work literally starts coming apart at the seams soon after you’ve punched out for the day. The mythical Sisyphus kept right on rolling that heavy stone up the hill only to have it roll back down again, and keeping up with potholes in spring is not such a different line of work.

On top of that, you come to work in the morning to face an ever-growing list of phone complaints from irate residents who are sick and tired of the potholes in their neighborhoods, which are bigger and more dangerous than any others in town. They want action, and they want it now. This is where diplomacy and tact come in handy, said Matt Oakes, a foreman for the Bangor Public Works Department.

“We’ll get calls from people who say they’ve hit the same pothole nine times already and they want to know when it’s going to be fixed,” said Oakes, who wouldn’t even venture a guess about the number of pothole calls the department gets in a day. What Oakes really would like to say to those callers, but never would, of course, is that if they know the holes are there, why do they insist on driving right through them over and over again as if they weren’t?

“Instead, we tell them we’re working on it, and we’ll get to their potholes as soon as we can, and that they should try to drive around them in the meantime, if possible,” Oakes said. “You have to have a very thick skin in this job. People call us idiots and other things on the phone. There are nice people who call, too, but there are an awful lot of people who don’t understand, who have no patience at all.”

These may be the same types who scream at the snowplow drivers all winter and throw shovels at their trucks for being so heartless as to fill their personal driveways with what they refer to testily as “the city’s snow.” Some will even give plow drivers the old “You’re No. 1” sign by raising their middle finger in salute at the passing trucks.

“People get irritated, big time,” Oakes said. “But we’re not trying to be malicious, we’re really not.”

He said the frequency of snowstorms this past winter, and the melting temperatures that followed the most recent of them, have created a higher-than-average pothole count in the city. In the last two weeks, the department has had four or five crews out on patching detail just to keep up with the cycle of thawing and freezing of the old snow that lines the roads.

Finson Road and Ohio Street contain some beauties to watch for, he said, as do parts of Hancock Street, State Street and Valley Avenue. Stillwater Avenue has a few frost-manufactured dips so jarring to unsuspecting motorists that the public works guys call them “Yes ma’ams,” as in “Yes, ma’am! That was a good one, all right!”

On Stillwater, near Jo-Ann Fabrics, is a pothole that ranks high on this season’s list of most cavernous. The monster is insatiable, chewing up and spitting out three huge servings of cold patch in one week alone. A man who has worked on it said he first checks to see if a car antenna is sticking up out of the hole before dumping in another load.

After all, he’s been called No. 1 too many times already.