The Streets of the City of Lincoln are Plowed by Dipshits
Ah, the temperatures are down into the single digits, and the wind chill is into the negative double digits. It's a lovely time to be a Nebraskan, and by "lovely" I mean "Goddamn miserable". Here is what I did last night and why I hate being in this city in the winter:
8:30 PM - It is snowing, and all the meteorologists are predicting fucking doomsday. The radar shows a band of snow that starts in the southern part of Kansas and rolls to the northeast, right up over my fair city. The snow is predicted to last all night long and possibly the next day. One weatherman uses the word "thundersnow", which sends waves of sheer terror washing over me. I've seen thundersnow once, and I was pretty sure that the earth was going to fly out of orbit and explode shortly thereafter. I'm sorry, but it should not thunder and snow at the same time. It just shouldn't. Thunder is for summer, snow is for winter. No mixing.
Meanwhile, the geniuses who make municipal decisions for the City of Lincoln (the same morons who employed me in the summer months) have declared a "snow emergency", whatever the hell that means. If they're insinuating that I should stay inside, consider it done, because the wind chill is Goddamn -11 degress. It's not like I was gonna go for a jog in that shit. There is a huge list of school closings and event cancellations across the bottom of the screen as I watch USC decimate, rape and pillage Oklahoma just like the real Men of Troy used to do to...uh...Sparta or whoever. By the time they're done I think I can see the head of Jason White is on a pike at midfield to serve as a warning to all college football teams that challenging emperor Pete Carroll and his great general Norm Chow will not be tolerated.
8:45 PM - I look outside, and I can still see blades of grass peeking through the 2" of snow on the ground. I wonder when Lincoln turned into Nashville, because only Southerners could possibly consider this a "snow emergency". I believe you'd be slapped in Minneapolis for using the words "snow" and "emergency" in the same sentence until there's at least two feet on the ground. As I look out the door, it is snowing so lightly that I'd barely be excited if I were skiing the next day...but then I realize that for the dipshits of the Lincoln plow crews, this really is an emergency. Why are they dipshits? Well, firstly I suspect that they have maybe 2 plows, and secondly they don't know how to use the ones they have. More on that later.
9:15 PM - There is a knock at the door. Ben is already here, so I have no idea who else it could be. I open the door and see a girl of maybe 13 years old. She tells me that "we're shoveling walks in the neighborhood". She has just used the first person plural, and yet I see no one else. I let it go. At first I'm tempted to hire her for the job just to see how long it would take a girl her age to shovel our sidewalk (It takes me about 5-10 minutes because we have like 2 square feet of sidewalk), but I decide against it. I also decide against citing the multitude of reasons why I don't want her and her imaginary friend to shovel our walk, but I'll list them here for your amusement:
1) It's 9:15 and has only been snowing for about 2 hours. It's supposed to snow all night long and continue the next day. If I pay to have it shoveled now, sure my walk will be clear, but I'd better go and dance around on it or something because there could very well be another foot of snow on it by the time I come outside in the morning. I'll just have to do it again later and might as well have saved the money, which from the looks of this girl would have gone straight to Twinkies and/or PCP.
2) Our sidewalk is completely insignificant. It consists of maybe a 15 X 3 foot stretch leading up to the house and another 45 X 3 stretch across the front lawn. As I mentioned, it takes me about 5-10 minutes to clear it, so it's not like she'd be saving me much trouble.
3) I'm 22 years old. I'm in the physical prime of my existence. If ever there was a time in my life when I didn't need somebody to do physical labor for me, let alone a pre-pubescent girl, it's now. Add to that the fact that I have literally done nothing but play X-Men Legends with every free moment I've had since I bought the game around a week ago, and I really could use the exercise.
4) I bought a couple good shovels last winter after I got fed up with using the plastic, shitty, little Maxey-sized ones that Andrew bought, but then it didn't snow after that so I never got to use them. It's an obscure form of torture for a man to buy something from the hardware store and then not get to use it. Don't believe me? Go buy a power drill and try not to use it. I bet you drive a screw into something out of sheer curiosity.
5) There are two fucking inches of snow on the ground. Unless there's going to be a gnome parade down my sidewalk, it'll probably be passable for another few hours.
As it is, I tell her "no thanks" and go back to watching the game. I stop watching that at halftime and play some more X-Men while Ben surfs the ol' innerweb. Eventually Ashley gets off work, and we begin a text message negotiation about which of us is coming over to whose place. The negotiation finally ends at around 1:15 in the morning and after probably about an extra dollar or so in message fees on my phone bill. Why we can't just call each other I'm not sure...evidently we're still in that casual, "texting" phase of the relationship. Besides, why breeze by with the ease of speaking when you could painstakingly type sentences on a 9-button keypad? I hate our generation sometimes, I really do.
1:50 AM - I am driving to Ashley's place, and I have to stop while four people switch cars in the middle of the road in front of me. I have no idea why this happens or why it needed to happen in the middle of the street. The two from the rear car get in the front car, and then the two from the front go to the rear car. Then they drive away and turn off on separate streets. I try not to think about it, lest my brain explode, killing me instantly.
1:52 AM - I am driving down "O" Street, and doesn't look like it has been plowed, nor does 27th Street. Let me break that down for you. It's been about 5 hours since it started snowing, and there is no evidence that there has been even one plow down either of the two biggest streets in a city of 200,000+ people. WHAT THE FUCK?!? I get to 17th and Q and see that there has been some limited plowing of Q Street, but only the outside two lanes, as usual. For those of you not from Lincoln, let me explain. The streets downtown are one-way and usually 3 lanes wide. When the plows come through, they plow the outside two lanes, and don't touch the middle lane. This means that much of the snow from the other lanes gets piled into the middle, making it a virtual roadblock to most passenger vehicles. Again, WHAT THE FUCK?!? Now I'm no mayor, but I've always been from the school of thought that says that when you plow a street, you should make it easier to drive on, not harder. What if I turn right onto a street, and then need to turn left further down the street, and am not driving a Humvee? I just have to make 3 more right turns to get in direction I'm going? Plow the middle lane you dipshits!!!
Now let's talk about what they use to plow the streets. Lots of big plow/sand trucks like Omaha uses so they can get the whole job done well and all at once? Nope. Bulldozers. Fucking bulldozers. Firstly these things have a maximum speed of 25-30 miles per hour most of the time, so don't expect them to arrive wherever they're going anytime soon. Secondly they get shitty fuel economy, which means they have to return and refuel more often. Thirdly, they can't spread sand or salt, so you need a separate vehicle for that. Fourthly you need very specific training to drive a bulldozer, so good luck finding plenty of people to work on your plow crew. Fifthly, do you think you can plow side streets where there are parked cars with a bulldozer? No, no you can't, unless the residents are o.k. with having their cars bulldozed, which they generally are not. Basically what that means is that the side streets don't get plowed at all. In our case we're lucky, because some guy with a Wrangler and a plow blade clears our street. If a Wrangler doesn't sound like a good vehicle with which to plow snow, it's because it's not. Sometimes he gets enough weight on the front end to make the whole car tip forward on two wheels, which is funny to watch.
Of course by the time this all happens, I've already shoveled my car out, which means it gets plowed in again and I have to shovel it out. If you think Dave helps with this, think again. He has an SUV, so he doesn't give a fuck and just throws it in 4-wheel and packs down big ridges of snow so that they are unshovelable. He takes particular delight in informing me when I've been plowed in again so that I have to go shovel ice chunks for a half hour.
Basically the long and the short of it is that if you threw a plow blade on the Ram, I could probably do a better job of plowing all of downtown by myself than the morons who are currently paid to do it. For those of you who live in Omaha, give a shout-out to your snow crews, because those guys actually get shit taken care of. I never appreciated it until I came here, where the streets are plowed (or in many cases, not plowed) by dipshits.
8:30 PM - It is snowing, and all the meteorologists are predicting fucking doomsday. The radar shows a band of snow that starts in the southern part of Kansas and rolls to the northeast, right up over my fair city. The snow is predicted to last all night long and possibly the next day. One weatherman uses the word "thundersnow", which sends waves of sheer terror washing over me. I've seen thundersnow once, and I was pretty sure that the earth was going to fly out of orbit and explode shortly thereafter. I'm sorry, but it should not thunder and snow at the same time. It just shouldn't. Thunder is for summer, snow is for winter. No mixing.
Meanwhile, the geniuses who make municipal decisions for the City of Lincoln (the same morons who employed me in the summer months) have declared a "snow emergency", whatever the hell that means. If they're insinuating that I should stay inside, consider it done, because the wind chill is Goddamn -11 degress. It's not like I was gonna go for a jog in that shit. There is a huge list of school closings and event cancellations across the bottom of the screen as I watch USC decimate, rape and pillage Oklahoma just like the real Men of Troy used to do to...uh...Sparta or whoever. By the time they're done I think I can see the head of Jason White is on a pike at midfield to serve as a warning to all college football teams that challenging emperor Pete Carroll and his great general Norm Chow will not be tolerated.
8:45 PM - I look outside, and I can still see blades of grass peeking through the 2" of snow on the ground. I wonder when Lincoln turned into Nashville, because only Southerners could possibly consider this a "snow emergency". I believe you'd be slapped in Minneapolis for using the words "snow" and "emergency" in the same sentence until there's at least two feet on the ground. As I look out the door, it is snowing so lightly that I'd barely be excited if I were skiing the next day...but then I realize that for the dipshits of the Lincoln plow crews, this really is an emergency. Why are they dipshits? Well, firstly I suspect that they have maybe 2 plows, and secondly they don't know how to use the ones they have. More on that later.
9:15 PM - There is a knock at the door. Ben is already here, so I have no idea who else it could be. I open the door and see a girl of maybe 13 years old. She tells me that "we're shoveling walks in the neighborhood". She has just used the first person plural, and yet I see no one else. I let it go. At first I'm tempted to hire her for the job just to see how long it would take a girl her age to shovel our sidewalk (It takes me about 5-10 minutes because we have like 2 square feet of sidewalk), but I decide against it. I also decide against citing the multitude of reasons why I don't want her and her imaginary friend to shovel our walk, but I'll list them here for your amusement:
1) It's 9:15 and has only been snowing for about 2 hours. It's supposed to snow all night long and continue the next day. If I pay to have it shoveled now, sure my walk will be clear, but I'd better go and dance around on it or something because there could very well be another foot of snow on it by the time I come outside in the morning. I'll just have to do it again later and might as well have saved the money, which from the looks of this girl would have gone straight to Twinkies and/or PCP.
2) Our sidewalk is completely insignificant. It consists of maybe a 15 X 3 foot stretch leading up to the house and another 45 X 3 stretch across the front lawn. As I mentioned, it takes me about 5-10 minutes to clear it, so it's not like she'd be saving me much trouble.
3) I'm 22 years old. I'm in the physical prime of my existence. If ever there was a time in my life when I didn't need somebody to do physical labor for me, let alone a pre-pubescent girl, it's now. Add to that the fact that I have literally done nothing but play X-Men Legends with every free moment I've had since I bought the game around a week ago, and I really could use the exercise.
4) I bought a couple good shovels last winter after I got fed up with using the plastic, shitty, little Maxey-sized ones that Andrew bought, but then it didn't snow after that so I never got to use them. It's an obscure form of torture for a man to buy something from the hardware store and then not get to use it. Don't believe me? Go buy a power drill and try not to use it. I bet you drive a screw into something out of sheer curiosity.
5) There are two fucking inches of snow on the ground. Unless there's going to be a gnome parade down my sidewalk, it'll probably be passable for another few hours.
As it is, I tell her "no thanks" and go back to watching the game. I stop watching that at halftime and play some more X-Men while Ben surfs the ol' innerweb. Eventually Ashley gets off work, and we begin a text message negotiation about which of us is coming over to whose place. The negotiation finally ends at around 1:15 in the morning and after probably about an extra dollar or so in message fees on my phone bill. Why we can't just call each other I'm not sure...evidently we're still in that casual, "texting" phase of the relationship. Besides, why breeze by with the ease of speaking when you could painstakingly type sentences on a 9-button keypad? I hate our generation sometimes, I really do.
1:50 AM - I am driving to Ashley's place, and I have to stop while four people switch cars in the middle of the road in front of me. I have no idea why this happens or why it needed to happen in the middle of the street. The two from the rear car get in the front car, and then the two from the front go to the rear car. Then they drive away and turn off on separate streets. I try not to think about it, lest my brain explode, killing me instantly.
1:52 AM - I am driving down "O" Street, and doesn't look like it has been plowed, nor does 27th Street. Let me break that down for you. It's been about 5 hours since it started snowing, and there is no evidence that there has been even one plow down either of the two biggest streets in a city of 200,000+ people. WHAT THE FUCK?!? I get to 17th and Q and see that there has been some limited plowing of Q Street, but only the outside two lanes, as usual. For those of you not from Lincoln, let me explain. The streets downtown are one-way and usually 3 lanes wide. When the plows come through, they plow the outside two lanes, and don't touch the middle lane. This means that much of the snow from the other lanes gets piled into the middle, making it a virtual roadblock to most passenger vehicles. Again, WHAT THE FUCK?!? Now I'm no mayor, but I've always been from the school of thought that says that when you plow a street, you should make it easier to drive on, not harder. What if I turn right onto a street, and then need to turn left further down the street, and am not driving a Humvee? I just have to make 3 more right turns to get in direction I'm going? Plow the middle lane you dipshits!!!
Now let's talk about what they use to plow the streets. Lots of big plow/sand trucks like Omaha uses so they can get the whole job done well and all at once? Nope. Bulldozers. Fucking bulldozers. Firstly these things have a maximum speed of 25-30 miles per hour most of the time, so don't expect them to arrive wherever they're going anytime soon. Secondly they get shitty fuel economy, which means they have to return and refuel more often. Thirdly, they can't spread sand or salt, so you need a separate vehicle for that. Fourthly you need very specific training to drive a bulldozer, so good luck finding plenty of people to work on your plow crew. Fifthly, do you think you can plow side streets where there are parked cars with a bulldozer? No, no you can't, unless the residents are o.k. with having their cars bulldozed, which they generally are not. Basically what that means is that the side streets don't get plowed at all. In our case we're lucky, because some guy with a Wrangler and a plow blade clears our street. If a Wrangler doesn't sound like a good vehicle with which to plow snow, it's because it's not. Sometimes he gets enough weight on the front end to make the whole car tip forward on two wheels, which is funny to watch.
Of course by the time this all happens, I've already shoveled my car out, which means it gets plowed in again and I have to shovel it out. If you think Dave helps with this, think again. He has an SUV, so he doesn't give a fuck and just throws it in 4-wheel and packs down big ridges of snow so that they are unshovelable. He takes particular delight in informing me when I've been plowed in again so that I have to go shovel ice chunks for a half hour.
Basically the long and the short of it is that if you threw a plow blade on the Ram, I could probably do a better job of plowing all of downtown by myself than the morons who are currently paid to do it. For those of you who live in Omaha, give a shout-out to your snow crews, because those guys actually get shit taken care of. I never appreciated it until I came here, where the streets are plowed (or in many cases, not plowed) by dipshits.
posted by Beav at 2:39 PM
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