Category: Uncategorized Page 3 of 10

Too Much of a Good Thing

On October 3, 2010

I talked with my cousin Nancy from Memphis a little while ago. She was telling me how the University of Memphis campus has changed since we were at school there.

“The clearest memory I have of the campus and buildings is the parking lot on the way to Central Towers,” I said.

“How come?” she asked.

“Because that was the place I saw that guy squatted down between two parked cars man-handling himself. That thing was so long it would have scared a horse.”

“I think I saw that same guy. Did he have red hair?”

“I don’t know, all I saw was about 17 inches of man-flesh bobbing up and down.”

“The guy I saw was behind a bush just goin’ at it with that man root.”

“Man root?” I laughed.

“You’ve never heard it called ‘man root’?”

“Never have, but that’s what I’m going to call it from now on.”

“Well,” Nancy said, “you talk about long. When I went to spend some time with my dad in Trinidad one summer while he was in Naval Intelligence, he set me up to stay with this young couple who had a house. The husband worked with him. Anyway, this guy’s wife was this sweet little thing, innocent and really pretty. I liked her a lot, but he was a creep.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. His man root was so big you could see the mass of it in his shorts, like he had some kind of creature in there. It rolled around when he walked. Sometimes the tip would poke out the end of his shorts. I’m not kidding, it was like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

I don’t know why, but talking about this part of a man makes me laugh hysterically. Listening to her story, I was nearly bent over double.

“One time we were all sitting in the living room, and his wife was in a chair where she had to twist her head away to see the TV. He took that thing out and was rolling it around in his lap, like he was stroking a pet. It was as big as one of those things kids float around on in a pool – one of those noodles. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He was unbelievable. Biggest thing I’ve ever seen. Like something that should be in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”

“What did you do?”

“I couldn’t tell my dad because he would have killed him. And I really liked his wife, so I didn’t want to make trouble. I was in high school and didn’t know what to do. Luckily I had a girlfriend there and asked if I could stay with her and her family, so I switched places with my dad’s blessing and he never found out.”

We laughed some more about unbelievable sizes and getting out of crazy situations. What’s so odd is that just about every woman I know has a story similar to this. Let me go on record right now, and I think I speak for most women, that those things are not, generally speaking, an appealing sight to women. Even Tarzan had enough sense to wear a loincloth. Men, please keep those things under lock and key. And I don’t care what you might think, bigger is not better. I would run like I was being chased by a swarm of yellow jackets if something like that tried to cozy up to me. Oooo, gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.

Hemorrhoidic Flaggers

By Suzanne Olsen

On September 16, 2010

In Uncategorized

I walk my dog every day at a park near my house. Today on the way I saw this humongous flashing sign that said “CAUTION.”

“Oh no,” I thought. “What mysterious, horrible fate awaits me ‘round yonder bend?” I braced myself for a giant pit in the road or a 10-car pile up.

Turns out that huge “CAUTION” was to alert me that a few yards down the road, four public employees from the Department of Transportation, commonly referred to as flaggers, would be at a four way intersection holding stops signs and standing right next to the stop signs that have been there for years.

Road construction a couple of streets over is causing a detour through this four-way intersection. Apparently the Department of Burning Through Taxpayer Money felt that the detoured motorists would not be able to manage to stop by themselves without the highly skilled assistance of four full-time (+ benefits) city employees.

To alleviate confusion, these diligent employees took cardboard and taped it over the existing stop signs to prevent people from stopping. This is no easy feat, because drivers can plainly see that there are stop signs under there. The octagonal sides stick out all around the square cardboard. This is a sleepy, local neighborhood street, and we are all used to stopping there. A man holding a sign that says, “Slow” just confuses the hell out of us. We have been given tickets, indeed very expensive tickets, on more than one occasion for going “slow” at a stop sign without actually making a complete “stop.”

So even though a man is holding a stop sign on a stick and it’s turned to the “slow” side, it still has a stop sign shape, and it’s right beside a real stop sign (albeit covered in scrap cardboard). Therefore, this morning, I approached cautiously (heeding the aforementioned big flashing sign) and when I got to the intersection, I stopped automatically out of habit.

The man with the sign did not like this one bit. He bent down and looked into my passenger window and signaled me frantically to keep rolling, his whole arm going round and round, as if I were the one-thousandth person to come to a complete stop already that morning. His lips were pursed, eyes bugging out, and he had a look of “you stupid woman” on his face, clearly indicating his impatience with my inability to comprehend the simple instructions on his “Slow” sign.

I looked all around, pretending to be afraid that someone from the other three stop areas might run into me if I proceeded, and this irritated him so much that I think he might have given himself hemorrhoids from the strain of trying to get me to proceed through the intersection. There were no cars within a thousand miles of the place, so I’m not sure what the big frigging hurry was, but I was absolutely in the wrong, and he wanted to make sure I knew it.

I got immense pleasure from the whole ludicrous thing. These employees have been there for months doing a piss poor job of standing in for stop signs. I’ve seen them delay people when no one was coming in any direction, like control freaks with a little power and no way to exercise it except to stop law-abiding citizens or force them not to stop, whatever their whimsy dictates at the time. Or try to make me personally feel bad because I wasn’t able to run the stop sign fast enough to suit them.

Twice a day I have to endure this for the sake of my dog. Twice a day I approach the empty intersection and have four people staring at me as they decide whether to make me stop and wait when no other car is there, or force me to speed through when everything in my being wants me to stop.

I hope they all get rhoids.

Dreaming of You

By Suzanne Olsen

On August 14, 2010

In Uncategorized

Every day people talk about the sleep they either got or didn’t get. “I couldn’t sleep at all last night.” “I tossed and turned.” “I had such bad dreams.” “I slept like a baby.“ “I had this great dream about …”

I remember having dreams about actors and they seemed so real. I’d meet Brad Pitt at a party and he’d find me fascinating. We’d end up going on a walk, holding hands, talking about our future together, maybe even kissing an electrifying kiss, and then I’d wake up to the dog licking my face. Such a rude awakening.

People who don’t get enough sleep are cranky, but so are the ones who get too much. Waking up before you’re supposed to is the worst. You have to decide if you’re going to go back to sleep or get up and start your day. In my experience, going back to sleep means I’ll have really weird dreams. They’re always bad – being chased by cannibals while my legs turn to rubber. Or trapped in an elevator and it starts free-falling. Those dreams seem so real. When I wake up, I look around to see if a cannibal is gnawing my foot, but it’s just the dog again. Get’s it’s her breakfast time.

I’ve noticed when I sleep about six hours I don’t really seem to dream that much, or else I’m forgetting them. I have always forgotten things. I forget the list where I wrote everything down I needed to remember. I’ve always forgotten where I put my keys, purse, the book I’m reading, the electric bill that’s overdue, my cell phone. How many times have I had to call my cell phone to locate it?

As people get older the world blames memory loss on age, but I think that’s unfair, and it doesn’t explain why my kids run around bellowing, “Mo-om, where are my shoes?” The answer I always give them is, “When I wear your shoes I always put them in the shoe closet.” They look there, as if I’d actually been wearing their shoes. Of course that’s the last place they’d put their own shoes… “Mo-om, they’re not in there – where else did you put them?”

Kids lose backpacks and homework, they leave their lunches at home, and forget the permission slips you place right beside their backpacks. But no one whispers, “Alzheimer’s” when they do it.

They also change the subject every second of the day, which is exactly what I have done here. Hey! Stop whispering, “ADD.”

Back to my dreams. I’ve had some really good ones and tried my best to stay asleep until the happy ending (wink wink). If I wake up, I can’t go back to sleep or even remember the dream. It’s very frustrating.

All this talk about dreaming makes me want to take a little siesta. Hey Brad, I’ll be there in a few minutes. Wait for me!

Laughing for Crying Out Loud

By Suzanne Olsen

On July 29, 2010

In Uncategorized

I went to an open mike comedy club last night. OMG! You talk about painful! (MEAN ALERT! I am going to be hateful right now.)

I did not know what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t this. We arrived a little late so maybe the “headliners” had already gone on. There were about eleven more people, and despite the emcee’s bubbling introductions that roused warm welcomes and cheers, these guys did not bring a lot of laughs with them.

It might have helped if there had been a few more people in the crowd. There were about 15 people there, and they had all been, or were planning to be, onstage. I only saw one guy with a girlfriend there – they left as soon as he bombed onstage.

Coming from me this might sound hypocritical. There have been many, many, MANY of these posts that I didn’t think were very funny and I’m sure you wholeheartedly agree. Most of the misses were because I was tired, I had eaten a big plate of beans for dinner and my stomach was gurgling, distracting me and making the air was hard to breathe, so I’ll admit I didn’t put a lot of thought into them.

Some of my posts have made tears roll down my eyes (although that might have been the beans, too). But last night at the open mike, I had tears but not from laughing. It was a crying shame how bad many of those guys were.

You could tell they had the talent to be funny – nice voices or great smiles or a rapport with the audience. But their problems were similar to mine. They didn’t put enough time into it.

They came up to the stage carrying notebooks. Oh boy. It’s always nice to see a comic come up on stage and read jokes. After awhile I was hopeful that at least some of these pages contained something that could make me laugh, but alas, ‘twas not the case.

The notebooks, I think, were security blankets. The guys glanced at them, pondered, cocked their heads, cocked them to the other side, and then looked up at us perplexed because maybe the lighting on stage made it so they couldn’t read what they’d written. Whatever the reason, there was nothing on those pages to help these guys in their struggle to be funny.

One guy got onstage and said, “Well, I put my name on the list because I’ve never gotten up in front of a crowd and I wanted to see how it felt. Hmmm, feels pretty strange and pretty scary. Hmmm, I guess it would have been, uh, nice if I had prepared something…” He went on like this, rambling about how he should have prepared for five of the longest minutes in recorded history.

Then a guy got up and said, “I had sex last night with an 80 year old woman.” We groaned because he was about 18 and we all started picturing it in spite of ourselves. The alleged comedian said, “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” More groans. It was even worse when he started describing the sponge bath.

Somewhere in their lives someone must have said to these people, “You’re a funny guy.” Being funny at a party is not the same as performing comedy onstage. Funny stand-up guys actually write jokes and present them in a logical, funny order. They work at it, and this is where the difference comes in.

Another thing these guys did was say, “uh” every 4^th word. “So I…uh….went down to the…uh….corner store and found….uh…..a magazine full of naked….uh….women who were….uh….naked and I….uh…. was….uh….thumbing through it when….uh…..”

The emcee couldn’t take it either. He got up after about 8 people and said, “You know, you see a lot of comics on TV. That’s where all comics want to end up, on TV. And one thing you might want to notice about these comics on TV is that they NEVER have a notebook when they go onstage. Just never see it. Just thought I’d mention that.”

So the very next comic brings his notebook up, but the one after him went onstage empty handed. “Ooooo,” I thought, “maybe this guy is going to be good.” He gets up there and fumbles around with his “uh’s” and “everybody doing okay tonight?” Then he starts contorting his hand around, twisting it this way and that as if he’s trying to find a freckle just below his elbow. Finally he says, “Oh hell, I heard what you said about the notebook and so I wrote my set list on my arm but now I can’t read it.” That got one of the rare laughs of the evening.

Actually, that’s not true, There was an older woman who laughed at everything. You could tell she thought her mission was to help bolster these budding talents. I thought it was very sweet, and I laughed a few times too – but mostly to keep from crying, as they say.

If open mikes are supposed to be funny, they should have “closed” this mike. Ha ha. I think anyone who could remember a few simple jokes would be a great hit at this place. For instance, these jokes would have brought down the house: What do you call shoes that a frog wears? Open toad shoes. Or what do you call a cow that’s had its calf taken away? De-calf-inated. LOL – I could be a comedian! Maybe you’ll see me up there next week.

I’ve Become My Grandmother

By Suzanne Olsen

On July 25, 2010

In Home Life, Uncategorized

I have become like my grandmother. We called her Gramps, and I liked just about everything about her except one thing, and that seems to be the thing I imitate.

I could have imitated her cooking and my family would be pleased as punch. Instead I have imitated her most irritating habit. She could NOT go out a door and climb into a vehicle in a single trip. Even if she’d been offered a million bucks to NOT go back in the house, she’d say, “Wait, I just have to run back in and get a grocery sack to hold the money.”

My grandfather, who we called Pops, and I would be in his ancient white Dodge Dart with the motor running, and he’d start grumbling, “that damned old woman,” because she wasn’t getting out of the house quick enough to suit him. He could barely see because he’d gotten lye in his eyes making soap decades earlier, so we had to leave about 45 minutes before church was scheduled to start in order for him to drive 25 miles an hour and get us into town in time – on time being with about twenty minutes to spare.

My grandmother would come out the back door, step down the first step, turn around and lock the door, step down the second step, close the screen door and make sure it latched, step one foot on the sidewalk, hesitate, look perplexed, arch her eyebrows into a V, roll her eyes skyward slightly like she was pondering something. Then she turned around.

Right at this exact moment, every single Sunday, my grandfather would unleash a string of obscenities that would make any sailor proud. “That damned old woman,” and then start listing every flaw she had, “she comes out the damned door looking like an idiot and forgets some son of a bitching something. Every damn time it’s the same old shit…”

Meantime she’s unlocked the door and disappeared inside. We wait a couple of minutes, me in the back seat snickering at his rage and that delightful cussing, thanking God for the wonderful entertainment He has given me on this fine Sunday morning.

The car is still running, and my grandfather leans his whole body forward, elbows all the way up in the air, and LAYS on the horn with both hands as if he can get it to sound louder and more insistent by putting his whole body into it. Still no Gramps.

“DAMN HER!” he shouts. “DAMN HER TO HELL!” As I’m typing this I am laughing so hard I can barely continue because I can see the empty doorway of that white house, hear the engine knocking, and see the back of my grandfather’s balding head with the wispy white comb-over, the air heavy from his rising blood pressure.

Finally Gramps appears in the doorway, opens the screen door, steps down on the first step, turns and locks the door, steps down on the second step, closes the screen door and latches it, steps down on the sidewalk, hesitates, looks pensive, tilts her eyes up and to the right, and my grandfather LAYS on the horn again. I have tears rolling down my eyes I’m laughing so hard in the back seat. My grandmother scowls at him and waves a dismissive hand toward the ground. He stops the horn and yells at the top of his lungs, even though the windows are rolled up, “COME ON, OLD WOMAN!”

She just looks at him, trying to remember whether she’s forgotten something else. She takes a hesitant step forward, then another. Stops, looks worried. Turns around and heads back toward the steps. I lay down in the back seat with my knees in the air and hold my chest, rocking side to side laughing.

My grandfather bangs the dashboard about six times with his fist as hard as he can. She goes back into the house and comes out a few minutes later with a dime-store see-through scarf thrown rakishly around her neck. Pops has not stopped cussing and ranting since she headed in.

Gramps walks toward the car with determination, head held high and shoulders back as if she is some dignitary with places to go and people to see. She opens the car door, hesitates, looks back toward the house. My grandfather yells, “Get in the car, damn you!” She waves her hand toward the ground again like she’s warding off some pesky child or swooshing at a fly, harrumphs with indignation, and climbs into the car.

“Let’s go then,” she says in a voice that leaves no doubt that she’s disgusted but it’s beneath her, on Sunday morning, to say so.

In the back seat, I’ve laughed and snickered so hard that I’m exhausted, and none of us talks on the way to church except for my grandmother mumbling under her breath, “I just don’t see why…what’s the big hurry…plenty of time…” She’s nearly deaf so she thinks no one hears her.

We get to church twenty minutes early – just like clockwork. My grandfather waits in the car while Gramps and I sit through the long Latin service. I amuse myself by reliving the morning’s entertainment. When church is over, everyone is cordial as if cussing and damning and yelling and horn-blowing hadn’t been going on earlier.

I have enjoyed some belly laughs writing this – my mascara is running. What I’ve described is the habit I’ve picked up from my grandmother. I never climb in the car and leave – I always forget something. Sometimes I get out of the driveway, but I have to go back, turn off the car, grab the keys, unlock the door, run through the house looking for whatever I forgot, and run back outside. The sad thing is that my kids are NOT amused waiting for me in the car. I wish Pops were here to entertain them.

ADD and the Naked Cowboy

By Suzanne Olsen

On July 10, 2010

In Uncategorized

I heard a comedian on the radio sing a song he’d written for his son who has ADD about a cowboy with ADD. The only part I can remember is the ADD cowboy says he’ll brand some of the cows but he won’t brand them all (I guess because of the ADD). I’m going to Google to see if I can find the rest of the lyrics because it was amusing.

Well, Google was no help. I came up will all kinds of lyrics but not for this song. BUT, I found something even more intriguing – an article about a Naked Cowboy.

You could see how this would distract me from my mission. There’s a cowboy whose claim to fame is belting out country western songs wearing nothing but a white cowboy had, white BVD’s (or whatever they’re called – those white underwear little boys wear and some grown men also wear because they apparently don’t own a mirror).

I like my men in boxers or nothing at all – and if they must be naked, the lights better be down low because the male body is much, much less attractive when it is all exposed. Leave THOSE PARTS to the imagination, please. I’m sure it’s the reason why natives are always pictured wearing a loincloth. Even Tarzan understood this. He went out and bought himself one of those triangle leopard cover-ups that are so popular in the jungle. Tarzan was no fool!

This naked cowboy, who is no Tarzan, is wearing BVD’s, cowboy hat and cowboy boots. But the article was about how he’s got his drawers all wadded up in a knot because a naked cowgirl is trying to hone in on his territory. She’s an ex-stripper who sings own version of songs like, “It’s My Party,” (“Tits My Party”) wearing a hat, boots, and a bikini.

The Naked Cowboy, like all astute businessmen, wants to protect his trademark, which is, uh, the Naked Cowboy. He’s fresh from negotiating a settlement with M&M’s because one of the M&M’s – I think it said the blue one – dressed up in cowboy boots and a hat and underwear and was playing a guitar – JUST LIKE the Naked Cowboy. The Naked Cowboy did not take kindly to this, and he and the blue M&M strutted out to the middle of Main Street. All the townsfolk of New York City ran off screaming to duck for cover when these two faced off, scowling because the strutting had given them both wedgies, but their hands were full of guitars so they couldn’t do anything about it. Fortunately, there wasn’t any bloodshed because lawyers crawled out of the woodwork waving their legal briefs and settled the matter in a professional and gentlemanly manner. They sued and countersued and counter countersued, ad infinitum until the judge rode them all out of town on a rail. (PS I’m taking a literary license here. I had to stand in line half the morning to get it, but it was worth it.)

Just when the Naked Cowboy had gotten his life back to normal, along comes this she-devil. The root o the problem appears to be money. The Naked Cowgirl wanted the Naked Cowboy to sing on a record she was making, but the Naked Cowboy wanted $5,000. The Naked Cowgirl did not have that kind of money. She claimed she was lucky to get a hundred bucks a day panhandling in traffic, and that’s on a good day, and only during part of the year because her work is seasonal. She also appeared to have issues with the Naked Cowboy’s hygiene, saying, and I quote, “When he wakes up, how does he know which way to put on his underwear? Yellow in front, brown in back.”

This mud slinging and catter-walling is probably going to continue until she can come up with the bucks to buy into the Naked Cowboy franchise. In the meantime, you can go to the link below and see a short video of her getting ready to perform in New York. She’s got on fishnet hose, an “Apache” bikini bottom (“rides ups behind you and wipes you out”) and a push-up bra or bikini top. She takes pains to make that bikini bottom reveal as much cheek as possible, and she’s bending completely over to pull on her boots. Now that’s talent!

I’ve got to wonder, how does a person decide on this particular career path? Does it require a degree? Are the benefits good? Do you get dental? What about the hours? How much paid vacation? Is there profit sharing? Retirement?

Or are you just wandering around in your underwear strumming a guitar and hoping some blind old man mistakes a twenty for a dollar? Who can say what drives people to pursue a life in show business?

It is a crazy world we live in, and maybe it’s better to be ADD. And who knows, one of these days maybe I’ll hear those lyrics again and be able to write the post I intended today.

FYI: To read the Naked Cowboy article and see the video, go here:

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/06/22/naked-cowboy-whips-out-his-legal-briefs/

I Sold Two Pictures!

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 26, 2010

In Uncategorized

I have good news! I sold two of my framed photographs at the Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts. It runs for 2 more days so I’m hoping to sell another. I’m too excited to write. I’ll write twice as much tomorrow.

Commercial-free Radio?

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 24, 2010

In Uncategorized

Today I was listening to Blue Collar Comedy on my satellite radio that they renewed for the next 6 months for a very reasonable price.

I can’t find Laugh USA anymore, which was the station I really liked because the others are pretty raunchy. Many comediennes say the f-word about twelve times in every sentence. In fact, it has become the new “you know.” It’s like the way stoners talk – except substitute in the f-ing word for every “you know:” “Hey dude, man, I went down to the, you know, store and I got some, you know, candy – a whole, you know, lot of candy like I, you know, practically bought out the whole, you know, candy aisle I was so, you know, hungry for a little, you know, something sweet.”

On these other comedy stations, they have announcers or interviewers or comediennes or chimpanzees – whoever is holding the microphone – talking like this, not just in the comedy acts. I’m not a big fan of “you knows.” It’s as if they are deliberating trying to insert the word as much as possible rather than just filling in the pauses with normal rambling while they try to remember what they were saying.

Sometimes they liven the word up by adding “mother” in front of it.

Today, however, I had other irritants on the satellite radio. Namely, commercials. Correct me if I’m wrong (at your own risk), but isn’t satellite radio’s claim to fame the very absence of commercials? Isn’t that why we are supposed to prefer satellite stations over the ones we get for free?

These commercials are awful, too. I think I blogged already about Prolixus – the enhancer that sounds like it will add girth to the male member. I don’t know about you but I’m not sure I want a member the size of a Progresso soup can coming anywhere near me. I was not broke in by a horse, if you know what I mean. Men should just leave well enough alone unless they are dating a porn star. The rest of us, and I think I speak for most women endowed with a normal anatomy, are not too interested in being skewered by an enhanced body part that would make the Jolly Green Giant proud. When we say, “size doesn’t matter,” we actually mean it.

I’m dipping into crude territory, but I had a long drive this morning and got saturated with these comedy stations and their stupid commercials. One very excited man was breathlessly trying to tell me that I had better hurry and snap up a home loan because these interest rates would never happen again in my lifetime. Is he psychic? He kept saying that the government has never allowed such low rates and I’d be pretty foolish not to jump on board and take advantage of his offer RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND, because, as he kept saying, rates would never be this low again in my lifetime. Never ever. Ever.

The commercials are homemade without any fanfare or background music, just someone claiming to be a lawyer or doctor or millionaire telling the public the honest truth about the great deals they are hawking.

I’m going to get to the bottom of this whole commercial thing if I have to call the satellite station administrator personally, except that I live on the west coast and you can only call between 8 am and 11 am Eastern Standard time, meaning that I have to call between 5 am and 8 am. It’s enough to drive you, you know, crazy.

Tax Dollars Blues

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 23, 2010

In Uncategorized

Recently I wrote about four city employees standing right under the stop signs at a 4-way stop, each one holding stop signs. Today I was at the same intersection and the same four city employees were there. The thought crossed my mind: “I wonder how much money we, the taxpayers, are paying these people to be human stop signs when we, the taxpayers, have already paid for the four stop signs they are standing directly under?”

My curiosity led me to pull over to pose the question, “What the heck?” (or WTF for you younger readers). I pulled beside a person in an orange vest who turned out to be a woman. “Why are you guys holding stop signs when there are already stop signs here?” I asked.

“There’s a detour,” she explained, and then went on to tell me the entire detour route. As she was doing this, the man holding the stop sign to the right of us yelled, “CINDY!” I presumed he was her boss and he was alerting her to approaching traffic so she could have her sign at the ready. He must have felt that the few seconds it took me to ask the question and her to start answering was distracting her from her duties, which he apparently felt required her undivided attention.

The first time he yelled, she looked over at him to acknowledge that she’d heard and was heeding his control-freaking. When I didn’t immediately scurry away, he quickly called, “CINDY” again.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m writing a humor blog and thought it was funny to see you guys standing out here under the stop signs. Is this really necessary, even with the detour?”

“CINDY!”

“We have to keep traffic moving off Multnomah Blvd. as they come around the corner to this part of the detour, and since this is such a short stretch of road right here, it could get backed up.”

“CINDY!”

We both looked at him. He turned away from us watched as one car approached him. He held his sign with the “Slow” side facing the driver. This meant that Cindy had to keep her “Stop” sign facing her cars. They were stacking up all the way around the corner of Multnomah Blvd., the very thing these four people were trying, at all costs, to avoid.

Cindy and I both watched him waiting for the car, which was approaching slowly and with extreme caution, no doubt confused that his sign said, “Slow” but the sign right over his head said, “Stop.” I knew the feeling. You really don’t know which one to believe. Finally the car got up to him and went through. Meantime about 20 cars had stacked up on Cindy’s side, blocking traffic on Multnomah Blvd.

Finally Mr. “Hey Everybody I’m In Charge Here And Don’t You Forget It!” signaled to Cindy that she could let her cars pass. The existing stop signs could have handled the traffic way more efficiently than what I just witnessed.

You know those signs at highway construction sites that say, “Your tax dollars at work?” I think that my tax dollars hired some folks that aren’t giving me my money’s worth.

Stopping for Signs

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 15, 2010

In Uncategorized

Today I was driving to meet my friend so we could walk our dogs and I came up to a 4-way stop. Standing under each of the stop signs was a highway flagger person holding a metal sign with “slow” on one side and “stop” on the other. There was no construction being done as far as the eye could see.

The person facing my side of the traffic had his sign turned to “slow.” The car in front of me pulled forward. When I stopped, as has been my custom for many years in this intersection, he started waving the sign frantically for me to GO SLOW (NOT STOP)!

I don’t know what the guy’s big hurry was. There were no other cars in the entire intersection, and no construction going on, and even his walnut-sized brain could figure out I’d stopped out of habit, so why’d he throw a hissy fit?

I can imagine the skilled training he was required to complete when hired for this position.

“Okay, you’re going to hold this sign here, directly underneath this Stop sign, and when the cars get close, you want to wave it in the air like this to make ‘em stop. Then you make ‘em wait a few minutes while you look back and forth like there’s something important you need to check, and take a puff or two on your cigarette, and then oh so slowly turn the sign around and let ‘em go. You got that?”

“Whoa, that’s a lot to remember. You say I need to take a puff off my cigarette? But I don’t smoke.”

“Holy Jiminy Christmas.. Where do they get you guys? If you don’t smoke, you should. In the meantime, just pick your nose or scratch your ass or whatever you can think of to stall drivers approaching this intersection.”

“Why can’t I just let them go right away?”

“Now what on God’s green earth would be the point of that? You want to make this job fun, don’t you? Well, it ain’t no fun if you just let ‘em go. If you hold them off long enough, they’ll start squirming in their seats a little, and then they’ll start slapping their fists against the steering wheel. I get a real kick out of that. It’s pretty entertaining on a long shift in the rain. Otherwise your days are going to seem like they last 60 hours. Is that what you want?”

“Well, I…”

“And another thing. You start letting people through in a hurry and you’re going to make the rest of us look bad. Then we might lose our jobs, especially on a project like this where we got four flaggers standing under already existing stop signs, and it’s totally unnecessary for any of y’all to be here. We stick together and go by the code, which is: make ’em wait, make ’em wait, make ’em wait. If that’s not something you think you can handle, then you’d better hang up your sign. You got all that?”

“I guess so.”

“You’ve taken me well over five minutes to train you, and now I’m behind for my break. I hope you learn to pay attention out here or else you’ll need to find yourself another line of work.”

“I just…”

“Don’t give me no lip, boy. Now get a holt of that sign and get out there and start slowin’ down some traffic like I told you.”

When I went back home this morning, I took another route. I didn’t have the time to waste watching the State of Oregon spend money on construction crews waving signs to tell me to do the obvious. I’m sure Oregon had good intentions this morning, but you know what they say about good intentions. The road to Hell is paved with them, but the road to the dog park is paved with tax dollars and nincompoops.