August Disgust (Monthly Mini-Rants)

The BBQ Pit
21

That was my first thought. That’s why white or mostly white license plates are so common. Ontario briefly switched to blue plates with white lettering, and police complained that they were difficult to read at night. Plate visibility really is a thing. Now they’re back to white with dark blue lettering.

The botched design:

Original design that was restored (personalized version – though I think all Ontario plates should have a picture of a dog on them!):

22

Is the yellow on turquoise hard to read? I think it’s a great looking plate, and isn’t hard to read at all.

The New Mexico Patriot plate, however, is almost impossible to read, and has the added bonus of looking like the US flag is on fire. Because, Patriots, fuck yeah!

23

That design is awful. It’s the double blue that kills it. White letters/numbers show up just fine on a dark blue background—indeed, way back in the day when you got a new plate every year, Ontario alternated between white on dark blue, and dark blue on white annually. That plate you provided, with white letters/numbers on a dark blue and a light blue (“Holy Toronto Argonauts, Batman!”) would be difficult to read, even in daylight.

And “A Place To Grow.” Yeesh! Ontarians of a certain age would never stop having an earworm from that damn song they made us learn back when I was in school. Hell, I can’t get rid of that earworm now, fercryingoutloud!

24

“A Place To Grow” beats “Famous Potatoes”.

But “A Place To Grow Famous Potatoes” could be interesting.

25

I’m sure your internal cynic is right, but my first thought at seeing a red Oklahoma license plate is that the OU(1) grads were in charge at the DMV.

(1) For those not in the know, the colors for the University of Oklahoma are red and white.

For a long time the Oklahoma plates sported the slogan “Oklahoma is OK”. Which, in addition to being amusing the first time one heard it, was ironic given the arrogance of the OU (see note 1) sports fans.

I grew up in Kansas and moved to North Texas after college. I have probably driven more than 100,000 miles back and forth across Oklahoma over the years, so I’ve had way too much time to think about Oklahoma license plates and roads. Such as, they have signs around construction sites on I35 in Oklahoma which say “Don’t hit our workers. Avoid $10,000 fine.” Who are these aimed at? Who are the drivers who aren’t concerned about hitting someone with their car but they are concerned about being fined $10,000?

26

When I grow up I want to be a (male) construction worker.

You spend the day doing your job and making a mess by tossing debris everywhere and at the end of the day you hop into your truck and go home. The mess stays behind.

We’ve been having all 27 windows replaced in the house we’re living in (it doesn’t belong to us - we’re caretaking). The window guys are sweet and all but holy Hannah do they not give a shit about the fact that we are living in this house. Along with not picking up after themselves at all - not even a little bit unless I’m around giving them the stink eye - they also leave windows half installed with great gaping holes for the rabid mosquitoes to visit through all night.

And then there’s the staging that gets put up and left up despite now working on an entirely different side of the house and just putting up more staging. I’m especially happy about the staging across the front door and the access to the car charger.

There’s a long weekend coming up and they’re taking an extra day as well so when they blew out of here at 11 (am) the crap they left behind will be part of my life for 4 days unless I spend a few hours sorting and cleaning it up.

I don’t know if it’s a guy thing (I’ve never had female construction workers sadly) but I really want to be able to do a job and have some other person follow behind me picking up.

And they’re not saving me any money by having me clean up after them - I’m not paying for this.

27

Probably the types who’ll do hit-and-run when they injure or kill pedestrians. Someone else’s injury or death isn’t anywhere near as important as their wallets/time/inconvenience/embarrassment.

28

You should aspire to being a highway construction worker. From frequent personal observations, I conclude that the primary activity of a highway construction worker is Standing Around. That’s what they’re always doing. The only reason any road construction actually gets done is because there’s one guy high up in the cab of some monster machine that is doing all the work, but there’s no manual labour involved here, either – the guy is just pulling levers. Why do they call these guys “labourers”?

But the guy who has to pull levers has one advantage over the rest of the crew who are Standing Around – he’s sitting down. I imagine the day is not far off when the construction workers’ union will demand lawn chairs for their members, so that instead of Standing Around they can be Sitting Around. :wink:

29

I have a bit of experience in this. I used to be a laborer many years ago. I did work on roads at times, mostly things like crack sealing and filling in potholes. But we did have to put out proper signage, cones, etc.

In those days, the one job that was heavily coveted was flagger. A flagger is the person who holds the sign that says “stop” on one side and “slow” on the other. Most of their job is literally standing around doing nothing.

But it’s not as easy at it sounds. Standing in a road for hours is not fun. And you have to do your job well, especially when you have a situation where you are coordinating with other people to make people stop and move again if you are directing two directions of traffic through one lane. If you screw up, you can cause an accident, maybe even cause an injury or death. And any kind of work on a roadway is inherently dangerous.

The reason why we wanted that job is it paid twice as much as what we were making at the time and was always in demand. But nobody had the illusion that it was easy work. And getting your foot in the door was harder than it sounds. Generally, you don’t get hired without having a certain amount of experience, and you can’t have experience if you haven’t done it. You see where I’m going with this. If you put just anyone in that kind of job, really bad things can happen.

I’ll also note that during my laborer days, I worked as a US Navy contractor and I did a lot of odd jobs on a military base. Often I’d go into work not quite knowing what I’d do that day. And once I was told that my job was to go to a drydock area where submarines are suspended up in the air to be worked on (so you can fix the top, bottom, sides, everything) and warn anyone I see that it was a hardhat area. You might have someone a hundred feet or more in the air on a catwalk or boom vehicle who could drop a wrench or screwdriver, so anyone in the area needed a hardhat for safety.

Sounds easy, right? It was. I literally sat around for hours doing nothing except telling the few people I saw that they needed a hardhat. (Note that I wasn’t going to enforce anything, I wasn’t policing the area or serving as a safety officer, I was literally instructed to just tell people they needed a hardhat.)

But after being there for a while two things occurred to me.

  1. The job sucked. It may have been one of the most miserable working experiences of my life. Sitting there with nothing to do made the day crawl by forever. When you are actually busy doing real work in a job, the time can fly by. When you are just sitting there it drags on and on. I even had a book to read, which helped, but this was an 8 hour day.

  2. I literally did the same job that a sign did. I suppose the theory is that people are less likely to ignore someone speaking to them than a sign, but in any case I was more or less a human sign.

It was awful. And those people on the side of the road might be just as miserable as I was. I love my job today, I have a fulfilling career where I help people, solve problems, make a difference, and general end each day with a sense of accomplishment. You have none of that with a worthless do-nothing job.

30

Thanks for the first-hand account of what those jobs are really like, much appreciated. I hope it was clear that most of that was tongue-in-cheek and not intended seriously (I doubt that in the future they’ll be supplied with lawn chairs!). It may not even have been an original idea – it might have come from Dave Barry, but it resonated with me because of the oddity of all the major work obviously being done on a highway construction site, but whenever I drive by one – almost every time – there’s a group of construction workers seemingly just standing around.

It’s probably a lot like working on an automobile assembly line. I visited an assembly plant once, and knew someone who worked in one. He confirmed the impression I had, and then described why it was misleading. The impression was that the workers were doing an easy job – the line seemed to move slowly, and they were equipped with all of the best power tools and power assists possible.

But in fact the way he described it, it quickly became, at best, the worst kind of repetitive drudgery, insufferably boring, and worsened by the relentless pressure not to fall behind and by repetitive physical exertions. He hated that job with a passion and eventually quit when he couldn’t take it any more.

31

Absolutely, I never assumed you were actually mad and I don’t think anyone who has ever worked such a job would be offended. I mean, what you said isn’t even wrong! It’s just one of those situations where the grass seems a heck of a lot greener on the other side.

32

Years ago, I took a class on flagging. It included dealing with aggressive, hostile drivers and dealing with possible health issues. I had never considered that a driver coming up to a flagger could have a heart attack. You could see the whole class shiver at the thought.

33

…in anticipation?

34

Sort of. We were told at the beginning that we’d be acting out different scenarios. I know I wasn’t looking forward to that.

35

Say what?

We’ve had lots of work done on our house. The contract always specifies leaving the site “broom clean” or similar. Sure, it’s a mess while the job is ongoing, but the final payment isn’t handed over until the house and yard are totally cleaned.

36

Sorry to hear about @slumtrimpet’s experience, but for anyone thinking about replacing their windows, we looked at Andersen (good, but very expensive) and selected Home Depot (nearly as good, much less costly).

They use their own staffers, not subcontractors, and we had no problems with them. They were quick, efficient, and cleaned up completely, and installed 15 window, including one very large picture window, on schedule in two days.

37

We have an old house with old windows. Found a place that hand-builds “old windows”- wooden, double-hung storms, with mullions to match what we had.

And, get this, they use “wavy glass”! Old glass taken from windows they’ve replaced in the past. R value is probably a negative number, but they do have built-in weatherstripping around the edges.

38

I’m sorta kinda hopeful that they’ll eventually clean up when the job is done. Problem is, this is on-going and it’s very disruptive. Every window has to be accessible from the inside as well as the outside so furniture and stuff has to be moved. They do about 6 windows per day but they don’t finish them. They put the new window in and then leave to do another one but the mouldings and all the finish work is yet to be done so nothing can really be put back into place. And they leave at the end of the day as if the house was on fire - drop everything and run.
I have to live here when they’re gone for the rest of the day or weekend.
And trust me, if they don’t cart away the old windows and assorted debris at the end of this job I will be advising the owner to not pay until they do.

But I just want someone to pick up after me … must be nice.

39

Very cool!

40

Another uti. Third one of the year.