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Road Construction. We all hate it. It makes us late for wherever we desperately need to be at that moment. If you're driving a manual transmission car, it makes you wince every time you have to engage your clutch to move forward 5 feet. It really makes you hate sport utilities and minivans as they are in front of you and block your whole field of view. And lastly, it tends to bring out the worst in people for road rage. Example: "There's no f'ing way I'm letting this jackass merge in front of me. I'm not moving, I'm not moving, I'm not backing off. He's just going to have to hit my fender. I'm not giving in this time....oh and what's this? *looks in side mirror*. No WAY Lexus RX300-bitch is going to squeeze in behind Mr. Jackass. There's just no way!!! *slams on brakes*. You @#$#@23$@#@#!@#!!!!!!!". Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you've probably been stuck in traffic because of ROAD CONSTRUCTION! Now, can someone clue me in here? What are these people actually doing? Because inevitably, you have about 10 guys (sometimes a woman, doing the flag waving if they're down to one lane for both directions) all standing there. Now here's the breakdown on "actual work being done". Two guys are supervisors. They're the ones who drove the state-owned, white Ford Crown Victorias with the yellow idiot light flashing on the dashboard (causing already slow moving traffic to come to a halt thinking its a cop) that's parked half on the curb half in the road nearby. They stand there and point and look important and wear hard hats. Then there are 4 other guys there watching. You may catch them slipping up in their act as they may be drinking coffee. This coffee totally foils their disguise of actually doing work. But you won't see this very often because most of the time, they're standing their concentrating intently and looking serious. Then there's the guy sitting in the dump truck waiting on this job to progress so he can dump/load something and be on his way. He's undoubtedly still on the clock as he sits there and waits. Then we have our flag man/woman who stands there and twirls the road sign back and forth to display the "stop" or "SLOOOWWWW" message (SLOOOWWWW = drive through so fast you almost run over the workers feet because you're pissed that you waited there so long). What are we up to, eight? Yep, so that leaves the guy with the shovel (even with modern technology it all comes back to this simple tool) and the guy running the backhoe. The backhoe dude is doing some work, but lets face it, he's still not earning his $20 an hour like the shovel dude is. Did I say $20 an hour? Yup. Now, this is just a total speculative guess from out of the blue on my part. But am I that far off? Probably not. But in reality, the workers might see $10 to $12 of this because the rest goes to the union!! Oh yes, the people who have labor workers interests at heart so that they can stand around and drink coffee looking important and get paid for it! Now this rant isn't over yet. How many times have you seen the dreaded sawhorse/cones/drums set up blocking off lanes. And you drive and drive and drive and finally you see (usually no one around) a few abandoned construction vehicles clustered around some section of the road roughly 30 feet long that looks like a bomb crater? This is the "construction zone". The secret is that they're not really doing anything. They're just ripping up the road for no reason and putting it back (usually) in worse shape than it was previously. Meanwhile, you've been carefully driving through the damn one lane (since the other is blocked off) carefully avoiding rear-ending the moron in the SUV in front of you who keeps left foot braking so you can't tell if they're really stopping or what. Not to mention the sawhorse/cones/drums on the side of you (Didn't you ever think it'd be fun to drive a large truck or something beat-up that you didn't care about and knock a few of these over into the path of the nimrod right behind you? Come on, you know you have thought about it.). So what is the answer to why we have so much unnecessary road construction? Because if the highway administration doesn't spend all the money they're allocated for the year then next year they get less money and its harder to justify an increase! So they have to do all these pointless projects, with over-inflated union labor, with 3 to 4 times the amount of actual workers they need to complete the project, on a perfectly good road! We have our answer! Only our government in all their bloated, bureaucratic, all-money-wasting, wisdom could come up with a system like this! And its sheer genius to add an invisible highway tax of speeding tickets on top of this to finance this crap! And we really elect these slimeballs who come up with these laws? What are we thinking! |