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Letters From North America
by Peary Perry
Awards |
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It
seems as if we have award program for just about every thing you can think of
these days doesn't it? We have so many movie and television awards I can't keep
track of them all. Every
day the papers are full of photographs and gushing descriptions of all of these
celebrities accepting some trophy of some kind.
Who knows all of these
people? I don't, most of them I've never heard of or would recognize if they walked
into the room and said hello.
So much for that…
What
I'd like to see would be an awards show for the good old American workers in various
industries. You know, some kind of a trophy for the greatest plumber or electrician.
Something along those lines.
I got to thinking about an awards program designated just for road crews.
I think an annual award program for those guys would make a lot of sense and could
be very entertaining. In my opinion it would go something like this:
"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to the 9th Annual Road Construction Hall of Fame
Awards. Tonight we're pleased to announce the winner of our Charles P. Rudabaker
Traffic Cone Placement trophy. As you know, Mr. Rudabaker invented the first traffic
cones in 1914, just months after the first automobiles started showing up on our
nations highways and roadways. Mr. Rudabaker's first road cone was made out of
concrete and had a short life, but was soon replaced with newer versions, which
served their purpose. In an interview with Mr. Rudabaker, he stated that he never
thought the road cone business would be so successful, since he had accidentally
invented them one snowy afternoon in Buffalo, New York. If you'll remember he
made his first invention to divert road traffic around a vegetable garden he was
plowing over. The state highway commissioner happened by and contracted with Mr.
Rudabaker on the spot and the rest is history.
Well, enough of that.
This year's winner is Harvey Snidley of Basketville, Oklahoma. Mr. Snidley breaks
his own record with his feat of laying out over seven miles of traffic road cones
in advance of a stretch of roadwork of approximately 41 feet. Mr. Snidley effectively
tied up the east side of a major interstate highway for over fifteen hours in
one single cone laying operation. Traffic was reduced to one lane for these seven
miles and the maximum speed attained during those fifteen hours by any vehicle
was three and one half miles per hour. At times the traffic backup stretched for
over fifteen miles. Mr. Snidley also deserves extra credit for his innovation
in picking a stretch of highway, which had no on-off ramps thereby eliminating
any persons from leaving the highway. Mr. Snidley is a credit to his profession
and is represented tonight by his wife since he is recovering at a local hospital
from a road rage attack last week. It seems he was trying to beat his own record
again by going for the super bowl of cone laying and had gotten up at 3am one
morning to lay out an all time high of ten miles of traffic cones. A group of
retired city employees from Michigan driving RV's became irate after crawling
through almost eight and a half miles of cones without seeing any construction
workers. They happened upon poor Harvey laying out the rest of his record-breaking
spread and the story gets confusing at this point. Most of the RV drivers are
out on bail awaiting trial and Mr. Snidley is expected to recover in a few weeks.
I'm sure he would have loved to be with us, but we hope to see him next year.
Our next award goes to the foreman who supervises the most number of road
workers but with the least number of men actually at work. This year's winner
is Marvin Fripps of Tucson, Arizona. Mr. Fripps achieved the unbelievable record
of forty-five crewmen standing around, leaning on their shovels or sleeping in
their trucks while one man was actually performing any construction work. This
record-breaking event took place near Bosley, Colorado when Mr. Fripps and his
crew were in the process of building a large sewer drainpipe across a major interstate
highway. This event was widely publicized by several network news teams who were
being held up by the almost dead to a stop traffic. Mr. Fripps explanation to
the news reporters was that "It was his opinion that only one man was needed to
perform any work at that point in time and he did not care to comment any further.
Further more if the news teams wanted to move along then they had better do so
since they were about to lay out more traffic cones which might delay their journey
another four or five hours."
Well, of course this isn't real…but then
again maybe it could be.
Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com
© Peary Perry |
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