A few weeks ago I wrote a post whining about my daily commute of 2-3 hours:

If you’re keeping track, that means that it takes me about 45 minutes to cover 35 miles of the commute and approximately 30 minutes to cover the other 6.

It stands to reason that right after writing it… it got worse. Considerably worse. The six mile tract became nine miles and instead of taking 40% of the commute it’s well over half. The “average” drive to the extent that there is one went up from 1:15 to about 1:30 and the number of days that it’s worse than that have gone up to once a week or so to at least twice a week.

The reason, I think, is that school got back in session. The full effects of this was masked the first couple of weeks by a teachers strike in New City and the fact that some of the local colleges started a little bit late.

Peter suggested (which I was already thinking) that I might just avoid the Splinterstate where all of the traffic is and instead go through the metropolis of Zaulem. I tried doing that but unfortunately it didn’t do a whole lot of good. At least I don’t think it did. There is a very, very helpful sign on I-3 on the drive up that tells me how many minutes it is to New City and how many to Zaulem. That actually gives me a heads up as to which route might be quicker. The Zaulem route has me going from Soundview (where I live) to Zaulem, Zaulem to New City, then New City to Enterprise where I work. I’ve determined that the trip from Zaulem to New City takes about 17 minutes or so. So if the difference on the light-distance sign is over 15 I go through Zaulem or otherwise I go straight on New City. I don’t know that it’s saving me time either way, but even if it’s not saving time the Zaulem route is more interested and switching routes punches up my routine a little, which is good.

It’s really strange to me how the window in the morning is some two or three hours of incomparable traffic hell wherein I honestly don’t know if leaving at 6:45 is any better or worse than leaving at 8:15 or at any point in between (though leaving at 7:30-45 does seem to be the worst)… and yet in the evening if I just wait for an extra hour the traffic is only a fraction as bad and I can usually make it home in an hour or so. Leaving right at the 5:00 bell is pretty bad, but it seems to get a lot better relatively quickly. On the other hand, the one day I left 90 minutes early (at 3:30), traffic was pretty awful. So it seems that the bulk of traffic hurts those that are getting there late and leaving early. Is Mindstorm (and/or any other employers in Enterprise) a company of get-there-late-leave-early slackers? Doesn’t seem to be, but that is what the traffic patterns would suggest.

What’s a little bit strange about that (to me) is that is contrary to my previous commuting experience. Usually it’s the drive home that’s worse than the drive to. It was 50% longer on my way home in Soyokaze in Estacado and Wildcat in Colosse. More often than not it’s about the same, though. This is the first time than the morning has been worse than the late afternoon.

I was at Costco the other day and saw that they were selling little biography DVDs of McCain and Obama. I thought about buying them because I really don’t know a whole lot about them outside their political careers. I didn’t end up doing it, though. Maybe next time. It did remind me that I’d gotten a hold of an audiobook copy of Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” book and that if I was going to listen to it I should do so before the election. So I’ve been listening to it on the commute.

I’m maybe 1/3 the way in and thus far it is absolutely phenomenal. I don’t even think it matters whether or not you care for Obama’s politics nor whether or not you believe a word of the book is true. Obama’s writing is terrific made even moreso by the fact that it was written before he was such a name and thus, as HalfSigma points out, was probably not actually ghost-written. Probably. The surprising (shocking, really) thing is, though, that if it were ghost written I totally know who wrote it: Orson Scott Card.

Okay, not really, but the resemblence in style is uncanny. They both use this sort of flowery language in this matter-of-fact sort of way. Concisely summarizing the human condition in order to make some relatively cursory explanation for a character’s behavior. Okay, so it’s a little hard to explain how they are so similar except that they just are. A couple times I had to remind myself that General Graf was not going to show up in Indonesia and help Barack’s step-father train Barack how to fight.

The book is read by Obama and the voice even sounds like one of the main guys from the Ender series. Though that may influence the connection, it’s definitely more than that. Obama also read a short introduction at the beginning. I was amazed at how stale his voice was during that part. I was getting worried that the entire book would be that stiff and dispassionate. Once he got into the novel itself, though, it got a lot better. In addition to being a skilled orator, he’s an impressive actor (insert joke here) taking on various accents and intonations as well as (if not better than) any of the other audiobook readers that I’ve been listening to.

My commute to work pretty much goes as follows. I drive about 25 minutes or so to get onto and then 22 miles down Interstate 3 to the town of Paulsboro, where I peel off and take Splinterstate 803. Including the usual delays at the entrance ramp, it generally takes me about 10 minutes to drive 8 miles down 803 to get to Castlewood, which is where I frequently get my gas. The drive from Castlewood to New City is another 6 miles or so. Once in New City, I exit to 740 and within 10 minutes or 5 miles or so land in Enterprise City and at my job at Mindstorm.

If you read the above carefully (you probably just skimmed over it, that’s what I would have done), you’ll notice something missing. I deliberately left out how long it takes to get from Castlewood to New City. I left that information out because I have absolutely no idea how long it takes, though I’d say that it averages about 30 minutes or so. If you’re keeping track, that means that it takes me about 45 minutes to cover 35 miles of the commute and approximately 30 minutes to cover the other 6.

But I didn’t leave the 30 minutes out of the initial description so that I could shock you with it later. I left it out because it is always the variable in my commute. My commute may average 75 minutes but that’s only if you’re looking at the median and the mode. That’s how long my drive usually takes in the morning. Somewhere between 70 and 80. Sometimes less, but sometimes much, much more.

I knew that having a daily commute time of over two hours would take its toll when I signed on to work at Mindstorm. I knew that it would be less time doing things that I enjoy doing and more time in the car and that there is the blood-pressure toll of long commutes in traffic (something that I never experienced in my long commute in Deseret, thankfully). I accepted that or at least thought that I did.

But what drives me crazy is the drive from Castlewood to New City and I don’t know how to make it stop driving me crazy. It’s not just that it takes almost as long as the rest of the commute. It’s not even that I spend that time barely going or weaving through traffic with all the success of Peter Gibbons in Office Space. It’s that so much of my day revolves around just how bad that six mile stretch is going to be. And perhaps moreso that I have absolutely no control over it.

My morning commute takes somewhere between an hour one day and two hours and ten minutes another. Anyone that’s lived in a city isn’t completely surprised by that variance, but what surprises me most is that the two hour drive was not marked by some sort of accident or closure or construction. As near as I can tell, nothing happened at all. When it’s construction you usually see it an can pass it and closures are also obvious enough. When an accident is cleared you can usually see the cars and people on the side of the road or even if you can’t there comes a point where everything suddenly speeds up and you say to yourself “Oh, okay, they must have cleared whatever it was that was causing the congestion. Nothing like that.

And 90% of all of the congestion takes place on that six mile stretch. If the drive takes half-an-hour more than usual, you can bank on 20 (probably 25) of those extra 30 minutes occurring between Castlewood and New City and most of the remainder being the stretch either right before it or after it. Every day, whether traffic keeps me on the road for an hour or more than two hours, traffic stops in about the same place, on Exit 6 to Castlewood. The reason that this is so frustrating and disheartening is that when you see the stall in front of you and you come to a half, you don’t know when you’re going to be moving again. When you’re driving to Paulsboro and then to Castlewood you are sailing but you know… you know… that you’re going to be sitting there in fumes and scrambling as best you can just to get one or two cars ahead. And so it’s like waiting for the shoe to drop or the hammer to fall. Since there aren’t many exits, if you think you might even need to go to the bathroom, fill your tires, or something like that you had better stop ahead of time just in case it’s another hellacious day.

I have driven in traffic and I have driven in traffic, but I have never in my life seen anything like it. Not just because I know every morning that it’s going to happen but because there’s just no way to account for it. I can leave at 6:45 in the morning and it will be there and I can leave at 8:30 and it will still be there. And there’s no pattern as to when it will be better and when it will be worse. I can’t say “If I leave at such-and-such time, at least it won’t be as bad”. On the three worst days I’ve had I left at 7:10, 7:40, and 7:50. I thought that I could avoid it by leaving at 9 or so because one day I left then and the roads were clear, but it was a fluke because it was the Friday before Labor Day. I tried it again and it took the usual (to the extent that there is ever a “usual”) buck-fifteen.

The only saving grace is that I have my audiobooks. I’ve made my way through the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio plays and audiobooks and am not working on Terry Pratchett. I’m considering Spanish tapes to try to make productive use out of my time. There are worse things than being trapped in a car, I’ve decided.

Like shared or public transportation.

A few days ago Clancy came up and said, “Will, we’ve got to do something about the garage. It smells awful in there.”

To which I replied, with not an ounce of sarcasm, “Hot damn! That’s great!” and rushed down there in excitement.

Clancy did not know that I was running a little experiment and the smell in the garage confirmed a relatively best-case scenario. As I mentioned in the original DAMN That Odor post:

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

With time, that smell only got worse and worse and I was sort of able to pinpoint the smell to somewhere in the trunk. There was a jug of fake fuel or anti-freeze or fertilizer or something (the label came off) and I had hoped that was it. Taking it out seemed to do no good, though. The rest of the contents of the trunk seemed pretty straightforward: Some CDs, a few comic books, roadmaps and atlases, some dominoes, and some gift that was directed to Clancy’s mother that somehow ended up in my car trunk. I thought maybe it was the gift, but it was from a place that didn’t do anything food or perishable. So my fear was that it was the Mystery Bottle and that some had spilled into the trunk and that it was going to smell this way for the rest of the car’s natural life.

So I decided to take the contents of the trunk and put it all in the garage. After a day or two, either the car would still smell and the garage would be fine or the other way around. Whatever the case, the odor was something that I was going to have to take care of before I swapped out cars with my father.

So the garage stunk and that meant that my car was not terminally stinky. Unfortunately, as with the trunk, it was really difficult to isolate the smell. I could tell that it was coming from the trunk, but I could not smell any particular item and notice that it smelled stronger than the other items. That’s what made me think that maybe something had spilled. And so it was in the garage. By process of elimination, I determined that it had to be either the domino can or the mother-in-law’s gift. The domino can contained… dominoes. So we said “screw it” and opened the gift addressed to Clancy’s Mom, which contained… gravy.

Extremely pungent gravy. Noxious gravy. Gravy that, as near as we can figure, has probably been in there since last Thanksgiving. The smell was hard to pin-point because it was leaking out of the sealed box. Even when I held the thing in my hands and sniffed through the cracks I wasn’t sure. It was only when it was opened and the garage exploded with foul that it was settled. The sealed box was likely something that the mother-in-law had simply re-purposed and was strangely thorough about repackaging tightly.

So the car is fixed. Now… if only I could figure out what to do about the damn smelly garage.

I broke the law over the weekend.

You ever notice how similar the cans for Coke Zero and Budweiser Select are? Being a regular drinker of neither, I didn’t. Turns out that they both have black cans with red lettering. It’s easy to think that you picked up one when you actually picked up the other. Very easy. I did so twice over the course of three days. The first time I simply thought that I was wondering when Budweiser came out with a cola flavored beer (come to think of it, why haven’t they?). The second time, I broke the law. I grabbed a can out of the cooler, opened it, and hit the road.

I realized my mistake after first sip, of course, but that left me with an open can of beer in my cupholder as I was cruising down the Interstate at 70 miles per hour. There are laws about having open alcohol containers on the road and I’m not sure a cop pulling me over would have understood my explanation (or would have wondered how drunk one must be not to notice the difference between beer and coke, which would have had the same effect). I thought about pouring the contents out the window, but figured that would attract undue attention. As would pulling over to the shoulder just to dump a drink.

That got me thinking, though… what exactly is the rationale behind having a separate open container law in addition to BAC drunk driving laws? I mean, if I was drunk, couldn’t they determine that with a breathalizer? Having alcohol in one’s system while driving is not in itself illegal (yet). The process of drinking from a beer can is no different (or more distracting) than drinking from a coke can.

Delosa was actually one of the last states to have an Open Container law. Not too long ago it was ridiculously difficult for a police officer to pull someone over for suspicion of drunk driving. Having a beer can in one’s hand was not sufficient. They’d usually pull people over by simply finding an alternate excuse (“changing lanes too quickly” or whatnot). So maybe the reason for Open Container laws is simply to provide justification for a pull-over. On the other hand, most of the time open containers are not visible until the car has already been pulled over.

I must confess that I don’t know a whole lot about criminal law, but would it be possible to be able to say that having an open container (if the cop can see it, of course) is justification for pulling someone over, but not an offense in and of itself? I’d figured that a behavior’s legality does not prohibit said behavior from being justification for further police scrutiny if it is otherwise suspicious, but maybe I’m wrong about that?

Another thought is that Open Container laws could be aimed at other people drinking in the car and distracting the driver. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either, though, because driving someone that is drunk is not only legally permissible, but actively encouraged (lest they drive themselves).

One of the things that gets me through my daily commute is audio books. I’ve made it through the Harry Potter series, Orson Scott Card’s Ender/Bean novels, the Da Vinci Code, and the first of the Discworld series. Right now I’m listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.

Orson Scott Card gives an afterword at the end of most of the Ender and Bean books, which is really pretty cool. He talks about where some of his ideas came from or later on about the various attempts to get a movie made out of Ender’s Game.

One time he talked about what he liked about audiobooks and how in all honesty that may be the best media for a novel. It allows you to sit back and enjoy it. Though, he said, if the listener is anything like him he’s listening while driving behind some truck on the Interstate. He shared that one time he was listening to an audiobook and he got pulled over in a specific barren western state because he was more interested in the novel than the speed limit.

As luck would have it, I started listening to Ender’s Game on the move from Deseret to Estacado… and I got pulled over in the same barren western state for speeding. I didn’t get a ticket, though.

Most of the time, though, he’s talking about the novel and what it means to him. In the end it really adds to the story and sometimes helps me appreciate something that I missed. That’s what happens when they tell you about the book after the book has been read.

Some fellow with either Pirsig’s publishing house or Fantastic Audio, who produced the audiobooks (for both Zen and the Ender/Bean books), decided that they would instead have a foreword. I wasn’t worried at first because I figured “What kind of idiot would ruin a book right as someone is about to read/hear it?”

Apparently, some idiot from Pirsig’s publishing house or Fantastic Audio.

Now I already know what the last lines of the novel are, what their significance is, what I’m supposed to think of the main character, what I’m supposed to think of the antagonist, and what various characters are thinking throughout the book. All in a short five minute intro. Stupendous.

I don’t know about you all, but I like those little dangly things that you put in cars to make them smell good. I like’em a lot. They were particularly helpful before I stopped smoking in the car, but even afterwards they cover up the smell of whatever fast food wrappers might be in my car at any given time. Clancy, on the other hand, hates them.

It’s all a little bit funny because my sense of smell is crap and hers is good. But then again, maybe that’s why. Having a diminished sense of smell, I like things that smell strongly unless they’re particularly foul. Even if they are particularly foul, sometimes I like the smell anyway. I am the only person I know that likes the smell of stink bombs, for instance. I also think that farts smell interesting rather than particularly bad.

Several months back, Clancy’s car got a strange odor in it. It was one of the rare times when I noticed something before she did. Clancy’s car is not exactly a model of cleanliness, so we figured that there was something in the car that needed to be taken out. The car was clean, but the smell remained. It really never got on her radar until she left town and came back. I guess driving a car that doesn’t smell bad opened her nose to how hers smells. We still don’t know what it is, but it seems to be coming from the air conditioner.

While she’s been gone, I’ve been hanging one little dangly fake leaf after another.

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

—

A year or so ago, a youngish girl (12 or so maybe?) knocked on our door to sell me some smell spray of some sort called DAMN. The bottle says “DAMN that pet odor! DAMN that smoke smell! DAMN it all Fo’ Sho'” or something to that effect. I ordinarily resent door-to-door salespeople and I don’t like how everything from little league to band has turned out kids into little Amway saleskids. In this case, she made no pretense about it being for some sort of charity and simply said that she’s trying to earn money to buy a bike. A little bottle of no more than a couple ounces was $5, but she assured me that one spray goes along way. Well DAMN if she wasn’t right about that. Two shots makes your eyes water and it’s been almost a year and both bottles are still half full.

—

Meanwhile, now our kitchen smells. I know why that’s happening: the trash can is overflowing. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to take it. Somehow, our trash can has become the neighborhood dump. Seems like every trash day, the garbagemen empty it out but then someone comes in and fills it back up again. A lot of times it’s beer, but lately it’s been like construction material or something. I was actually impressed the last time they did it because they managed to fill that thing so efficiently that you would think that they were a professional packer or something.

Friday is garbage day and hopefully I’ll have a place to put it then. In the meantime I might have to place it outside or something. On the other hand, the rotting whatever that’s producing the odor smells quite interesting. It really only bothers me because I know that it’s supposed to.

Clancy and I were driving down I-13 in Deseret to go to my cousin’s wedding and she was reacquainted with a driver that seemed to be collecting pet peeve of hers to toss out there and drive her blood pressure up.

The first thing he did was follow way too closely from behind. She kept slowing down so that he would pass, but he didn’t seem to want to do it. Then he finally did, driving right to the point that she was in his blind spot and then swerving back and forth.

We were pretty ruthless with our commentary. At first we thought he was drunk. Then I thought he was trying to read something, then Clancy suggested that it looks like he might be writing something. “Probably doing a crossword puzzle, I murmured as Clancy darted past him.

The next thing we knew the jerk had sped up too so that he could be right beside her. “What an ass!”

Then we saw what he was writing.

“You have a flat tire!!”

We looked at each other. “We do?” We asked. The car seemed to be pretty steady. Flat tires are generally something that you notice. But the car was a rental and we didn’t want to destroy it, so we waited for the next exit to get off on.

When we found it, the driver was getting off, too. This was an exit in the middle of nowhere. We started getting nervous that maybe he was jump us or something and take our car. Maybe he had someone with him laying in the back seat of the car. Heck, he didn’t even need that, really. A gun would have done the trick.

He was pulled over on the side of the road off the exit. Since we didn’t know when the next exit would be, we decided to risk it to check the tire. I got out my cell phone and dialed 911 so that if need-be I could just hit the “send” button in case of an emergency.

When we stopped, he walked over to the car and said “Sorry about that. I was really concerned about your tire. I guess it’s not entirely flat, but it’s pretty close.” I looked down and sure enough, it was pretty low. The guy we’d been cussing out for the previous half-hour was trying to do us a solid.

He said that he thought he’d had a tire pumper, which was why he pulled over, too, but that it must have been in his other car. So worst-case scenario, the guy was going to help us out looking for a tip. Once we were back on the road, we quietly apologized ourselves for all the bad things that we were saying about him.

I ask one thing of Harvey, my 1998 Ford Escort: Hit 200,000 miles. Interestingly enough, I hit 100,000 on a road trip from Colosse to Almeida, Estacado, the town where I now work. It is my hope that I hit 200,000 miles driving to Almeida for work.

It’s been pretty obvious for the last 15,000 miles that Harvey doesn’t have much left in him. I’ve had to put in $100 here and $100 there for repair, each time wondering if this is the time that I don’t get him fixed. One of the tough things about a car is knowing when to throw in the towel. One almost hopes for a $5,000 repair so that the choice becomes easy.

I hit 199,000 miles a couple weeks back. I can feel the 200,000th mile coming. I can also feel the car’s reluctance to cross that threshold. Lately there’s been a grinding sound when I put my foot on the accelerator. So I’ve been asking myself if I bother getting it fixed for the last 1,000 miles when I’m not going to be taking the car up to Cascadia when I move up there later this year. How much do I commit to spending per mile for that meaningless-except-to-me mile mark? It would be nice if, in addition to passing 200,000, I could hold on to the car until the move. Crayola, the car that I’ll be getting from my father as soon as Harvey passes on, is a lot less comfortable. Maybe I’ll get used to it, maybe I won’t.

I decided to go ahead and take it in to see what that grinding sound was. I worked it out with my coworker Pat that she would pick me up at the auto shop yesterday. Wouldn’t you know it that as I was driving to work, the transmission started slipping. I’d change gears and hit the accelerator and nothing would happen. Then there’d be this jerk and pop and I’d be moving. I’ve experienced this before and it typically meant that the car was on its way out. I crossed my fingers and hoped that I would get to Almeida so I could get to the auto shop. Partially so I could hit 200k, but partially because I didn’t want to break down in the middle of nowhere.

The car made it and I got the news that I was hoping for. The transmission could be cleaned out and it’d stop slipping for at least a little while, but the transmission was going to need to be replaced sometime relatively soon. The griding had something to do with the wheel bearings, and that would need a new something-or-other, but I’d be fine for the time being. So I was able to spend $200 to get the transmission cleaned, the oil changed, and the turn-bulb replaced, but I have about $1,500 worth of repairs right around the corner. The car is not worth $1,500 to replace… so when that happens, my question of when “enough is enough” to keep the car is answered for me.

200,000 and a breakdown and then that’ll pretty much be the end of Harvey.

I did something last week that I had never done in my entire life. Just my luck, a cop was right there to see me do it.

I was driving on I-31 from my apartment in Santomas 45 miles or so away to my job in Almeida. Out of nowhere, traffic halted to a scratch. It was so chaotic that I almost got sideswiped by a truck. Then it was dull, because all we were doing was sitting there. It’s not unusual for traffic on the interstate as commuters from one city to the next are not unusual, but never was traffic remotely this bad unless there had been an accident.

I saw hours and hours of my life flash before my eyes when I saw a ton of “Road Work Ahead” signs. Could they really be closing so many lanes during rush hour that everything grinds to a halt? I feared that if they were, my ordinary 45 minute commute was about to become a lot longer.

As more time passed and progress was minimal, I came to the conclusion that there must be an accident. There must, right? So I turned on the radio waiting for the traffic report. The AM dial was full of conservative talk radio hosts lamenting McCain’s victory in Florida the previous day and expressing their views on the immigrants from Cuba that assisted him in his victory. I couldn’t listen to any one of them for too long without getting pissed off, so I started maniacally flipping through of them waiting to hear the magic words.

“traffic report after these messages”

The ads were a welcome relief, and as promised the traffic guy came on. “There are minor slowdowns on Spencer Street and 8th and 9th street as is always the case on work mornings. Traffic hasn’t slowed down on State Highway 8 as much as usual. Traffic on the toll loop is clear sailing, so don’t forget to get your Estags so that you can start having cleeeeeeeear sailing around town. Also, I-31 is closed northbound because of an accident.”

After getting over my irritation that he’d saved the most noteworthy part for a single sentence in the back of his report, I started pondering my options. It didn’t take long because I had none. Ahhhh, well, I thought, and decided that half an hour in traffic wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Then I crossed over a hill and saw cars literally as far as my eyes could see. That was at least five miles and I’d gone one mile in the last half hour. That was when I saw it. The there was a little dirty bridge over the ditch between the interstate and the access road. Further, there was a Happy Burger just smiling at me in the town we were passing.

I had never in my life attempted to illegally exit a freeway. I typically look down on those that do since all it does is clog up the access road and doesn’t seem to speed anyone up. But then I thought about it some more and if I was just going to hang out at the Happy Burger and get myself some breakfast until everything cleared, what was the harm in that? Heck, at the rate things were going I could catch a movie at the theater behind the Happy Burger. By the time the movie was out surely the wreckage would have been moved, right? I was wrong about that, incidentally, and besides no movie would have been playing that early in the day.

So I decided on an impulse to try to make my naughty exit. And there was the officer on the motorcyle who happened to be passing along right then. In the previous 45 minutes I had yet to see a single police car. That was why I had thought that it might just be routine construction. Usually when there is an accident, there are police cars headed towards it, right? Up until that second, there hadn’t been.

Surprisingly, the cop just stopped in front of me and pointed for me to get my ass back in line. I was surprised that he didn’t write me a ticket because illegal exits (like driving on the shoulder) are the sorts of things that really piss cops off when they see it. I think it disturbs their sense of order disproportionately compared to the nature of the crime.

Regardless, the cop let me go and went on his merry way. I easily could have exited again, but decided against it. A Happy Breakfast Sandwich would not have been enough to make me happy at that point.

When I related this to my coworker Pat, she explained a theory that she had. Cops, above all, want to be important. They signed up for important work and instead get stuck on things like traffic detail. One of the reasons that crying when you get pulled over is one of the better ways to get out of a ticket is not because of sympathy on their part, but rather submission on yours. You’ve acknowledged their importance, so no need to be an ass about it. It is when cops feel that their importance isn’t being acknowledged or when they have nothing else to do that they start going all Napoleon. When there’s something big going on, like a wreck, they’ve got better things to do. They’re already important.

It’s an interesting theory.

All told it took me about three hours to get across six miles of Interstate. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even get to see the accident. It happened on an overpass, naturally, and they had forced us onto the access roads at that point. When you pay admission, the least you should get is to see the show.

The Interstate was closed for a whopping six hours in all. A flatbed delivering kitchen tiling hit a car or got hit by a car and there were apparently shards of tile everywhere. No one was hurt, but they had a lot of tiles to pick up and a gasoline leak to manage.

When I finally broke free of the traffic and was going 90 miles an hour (why not? Every policeman in the county had Important Work to contend with and nobody on that freeway was going below 80), I heard another traffic report on the radio. About twenty seconds of explaining that traffic on city roads were going slightly slower or faster than expected, five seconds shilling for the Estag, and one sentence at the end explaining that I-31 was closed due to an accident, once again not even mentioning where precisely the Interstate was closed.