Thursday, August 04, 2005

Rant On

When I lived in Massachusetts is was required that State Troopers direct traffic in construction areas. That may have changed since I moved away. I always thought it was stupid to pay a police officer $20+ per hour when they could be tending to more pressing business. Now I'm wondering if they don't have the right idea. Here there are just road crew people who direct traffic. I swear sometimes they are just the stupidest human beings on earth. Either stupid or lazy. I have been "suffering" through road work around my house for like 3 months. With the first street they were fixing the traffic director guy spent most of his time lounging under a tree. They finally finished that road and now they're working on one of more main streets. The other day I sat for like 20 mintues not moving. Meanwhile, traffic is backing up to the point that the people coming from the opposite direction have nowhere to go. So the guy in front of me gets mad and goes around the line of traffic (and turns down a side street...these are deadend so I guess he lived on that street) and I decide to follow him and tell the traffic director that he's going to have to let some of us go through because nobody is going anywhere. He had this sort of Bubba Gump look on his face and said he knew that. I couldn't figure out what in the world he was waiting for because there wasn't anything in the way up ahead. Finally this truck shows up that has "Pilot Car-Follow Me" written on the back of it. That has got to be the stupidest thing I've ever seen. If there were turns that you had to make or unusual equipment that could hurt passing cars and their drivers then I could possibly understand it. We're just going down an already paved section of road for about 100 yards!! I was sooo annoyed. The only bright spot in this road reconstruction is that they need to have it finished by next week because there's a school on that road and school is about to start.

Rant Off

1 comment:

Darla said...

Chiming in from the paving industry: generally when there is a "pilot car" involved, it's because there are safety issues involved. Usually it's a narrow road combined with wide equipment, and a lot of moving equipment in and out and among other equipment.