Mah thread deserves bumping after what I experienced tonight.
I left work at about 9:15PM today, because when you get a 25% raise you don't say no to crunch time the next day. Feeling awesome, I decided rather than take the road through town, I'd jam up onto the tollway to get home in record time. Indeed I nearly did, blasting along at 80 around the handful of people still on the road who seemed to have no place they particularly wanted to be.
And then I got within sight of my exit, and saw a ridonkulous pile of cars spilling into the road. What the fuck? Okay, I'll go up to the next exit. Sure it's a couple miles out of the way, but I don't have anywhere to be anyway.
Then the traffic slowed. Then it crawled. Then it stopped completely. And I made a phonecall to bitch and found out why. Some country singer I'd never heard of was playing at a fireworks show (that I could see) at some ballfield right off the tollway. To which we proceeded to travel down the tollway at walking speed, past closed exit after closed exit - the signs said they were closed, actually they were just backed up all the way out of sight into town. It made sense that we were traveling at walking speed, because apparently it's totally cool for people to just park in the right lane of a major highway (because it has no shoulder you see) to pile out of their cars and watch the show from the guardrail.
When I at last, somehow, got off at an exit nearly five miles from where I wanted to be, they didn't even bother having the traffic lights on, using police to direct traffic and otherwise pretty much just letting everyone sort it out for themselves. Okay, fine. I weave my way down a few intersections to the through-town boulevard (the way I should have taken home in the first place), and begin jamming back towards my road. Until I come to the main cross-boulevard.
Ten goddamn minutes watching the two cops "directing" traffic wave through cars that apparently wanted to stop anyway (judging by the way half of them did), as a mile-long que built up both ways. I know it was a mile long, because you can just see the next intersection a mile away and they were packed three abreast, bumper to bumper all the way there. Letting my impatience get the better of me, I turned onto the road when I finally had the chance, straight into the belly of the beast...
Long story short, I wasted a half-hour of my life. I literally sat there in my car with the engine off, watching police bikes weave through the crowd, the traffic on the other side speeding along, and people leave their cars in the road to go to restaurants, because the waiting time for a table was clearly shorter than the waiting time to make even a right turn. And then when I finally get to the head, expecting to take the service road home? The cops made everyone take a U-turn.
Still not having had my fill of purgatory, I dived off onto what I thought was a backstreet, but was in fact the entrance to an apartment complex. A complex with exactly one entrance. Me and three other cars driving around like Shriners trying to find some way, any way, off the Road Of The Damned. The road from which we all descend and to which we all one day return.
Luckily, I was then flowing with the grain, and after hitting the only operating traffic light in town and taking
four cycles to get through then pull a uey and take a right (which was indeed faster than waiting for a left), I finally just had to dodge the usual brand of idiots and at last return home.
Just shy of two hours after I left, on a ten mile trip. Just enough time to blog about it.
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Topic: See, I told the judge it wasn't just me. (Read 7717 times)