Road Construction-Are You Kidding Me?
So I’m driving home from work a couple of weeks ago, when a friend calls me on my cell phone. (Don’t worry, I have one of those bluetooth gizmos for my phone, so I’m actually able to take a call and drive with one arm.) He asks me what I’m doing, and I say driving home.
“Has the I-35 road construction started?” he asks.
“What I-35 road construction?” I reply.
He starts talking about roadblocks and closed off lanes and reduced speeds and long delays between Norman and Oklahoma City. But I cut him off.
“Didn’t they work on I-35 for something like ten years and then finally open it up about two years ago?” (I know the answer to this question. It’s YES!)
My friend proceeds to laugh.
“I guess I’ll just let you find out for yourself,” he says.
A few days later I’m sitting in a long line of traffic. My normal twenty to twenty-five minute drive home has turned into a thirty to forty minute drive, while the drive to work takes at least five minutes more than it did.
Consequently, someone has robbed me of approximately twenty minutes a day and more than an hour and a half per week!
Relax, they tell you in the newspapers and on t.v. It will all be completed in June of 2010.
Wait a minute, I think. I’m terminal. That essentially means for the rest of my life.
Helloooooooo.
I had a similar reaction at the end of 2007. It was just after I’d learned about cancer spreading to my liver when the City of Norman began advertising the beginning of a little road project around 36th Street and Main, by the mall. I happen to live a few streets away.
Shortly thereafter, you could hardly get out of our neighborhood, and the intersection at the mall was an absolute nightmare. Sometimes you weren’t allowed to turn left. Sometimes you weren’t allowed to turn right. Sometimes the traffic was backed up for a half mile. And all the time people were grumpy.
You mean I’m going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life? I thought a week or two into it. It didn’t seem fair. They hadn’t even asked.
The project was supposed to take a year, I believe, but that “goal” is already long gone. Meanwhile, I almost got creamed by a car yesterday while trying to turn out of my neighborhood. No matter how many ditches they dig or lanes they shut down or orange cones they put up, some people still refuse to believe there’s cause to slow down.
It’s a continuing nuisance, living on a different time table than the rest of the world. I feel like my voice isn’t being heard, that I’m in some minority with no political pull whatsoever, like the legislator who opposes legislative pay raises.
This messed-up time table happens to me all the time. I opened the mail a couple of weeks ago and found a $300 bill from the Oklahoma Bar Association. My yearly bar dues (I know what you’re thinking, but these are yearly “fees,” a/k/a taxes, that I must pay to keep my attorney’s license current) were supposed to be paid by mid February or I would be fined.
And I’m thinking, I wonder if these could be prorated, so I could pay them month-to-month?
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What a wonderful horrible way to look at it. I suppose that there has to be some level of humor to keep your sanity in a situation such as yours, but it is so sad that the rest of us get both annoyed by and inured to the situation that seems so bleak/never-ending to you. I cannot imagine how I’d feel if someone told me that some dreadful construction (etc.) was going to last “the rest of my life.” I’m so happy for you to be able to find the ironic humor in the situation. Thank you for the reminder that no matter what we think we know that there is always another angle, another perspective! I almost feel guilty for my chuckle, but then, if we can’t laugh at the unbearable, what can we laugh at?