I’ve spent approximately 93.3333333% of my life in Southern California. For most people, this means a couple of things. First, anything below 65 degrees must equal freezing to me. Second, I must experience 7.0 earthquakes on a bi-weekly basis. And third, I must know what it’s like to sit in traffic all the time.
Let’s go ahead and focus on that third statement. There are many things that cause traffic in Southern California. I’m sure these are applicable elsewhere in the country, but it’s to my understanding that what passes for light traffic here in SoCal is actually pretty heavy in other parts of the country. Parts called Iowa and Montana. Regardless of the part your in, you’ll agree that things like car accidents, weather, slow moving trucks driven by old ladies and the occasional loose animal on the freeway are the main culprits to the average daily traffic problem.
I’m going to rewind to this afternoon. I was down in San Diego to visit with my two younger sisters and drop off a bed for the guest room in the older one’s house. I didn’t want to hit any rush hour traffic on my way home, so I left at around 2 pm with the hopes of making it back to Ventura by 5 pm. With no traffic, it’s about a 2 hour drive, so I felt like I was being conservative by giving myself an extra hour. I was flying along just fine until I got to Hollywood and got on the 101 freeway. At that point, I dropped down from a fairly comfy 80 mph to a less than satisfactory .03 mph.
There are a lot of people in this world that might panic given the same situation. They might do something irrational like honk their horn or turn on their windshield wipers. (These kind of people live with the philosophy that the person driving the car in front of them is a complete idiot that lives a meaningless and empty life and clearly has nowhere important to be so they should just do everyone else a favor and pull off to the side of the road and wait to die.) I’m not one of those people. I calmly turned on the radio, flipped over to the AM side, played a little game of radio roulette (I mean come on, it’s AM radio. What are the chances that I’m NOT going to find a channel with traffic updates every 3 minutes? The Mirage in Vegas has it at 132,121,561,125,540 to 1. Those odds are pretty accurate. I had a chance to put those numbers to the test while I sat in traffic. It’s scary how accurate those odds makers in Vegas can be.). After I settled on a station, not surprisingly, I listened for all of 30 seconds before being informed by some guy with a fake helicopter noise in the background that, “the traffic mess that is the 101 is still being slowed almost to a standstill by the house in the right lane. Cal Trans officials are apparently still working on a way to get it out of there.” I turned off the radio and thought about it for a while. After about 10 minutes, I decided that a house in the right lane of the 101 freeway would indeed cause a severe amount of traffic in the city of Los Angeles.
----aside-----
Obviously there are a lot of you out there thinking that was a misprint. I was hoping that the fact that I said it twice would be enough, but it seems that there are several of you out there that are convinced I meant to type Shouser, the only car ever manufactured by Frankenshluuger, the small German auto company that sprouted up after WWII. Of course you all know the story. They were targeting consumers that get sick when they have to ride in the back seat of the car, so they designed a car three lanes wide with only front seats to accommodate up to 8 passengers. A good idea sure, but it was never fully accepted by the mainstream media and the company went bankrupt shortly after they released their first run of 1000 cars. They are mainly collectors’ items now but you thought that if someone were to take one out for a drive and it broke down, that could cause all kinds of traffic mayhem. So then you thought that I just forgot the “s” and “r” when typing and that instead of “house,” I really meant “Shouser.” After all, it happens all the time with words like “shirt” and “synthesizer,” so naturally, you thought that’s what happened here. Well, you thought wrong. If you’d only finish reading these posts before making these ridiculous assumptions, then you’d know that there are pictures in this post clarifying that it was, in fact, a house in the right lane causing all of the trouble. Think about it. A house WOULD cause a lot of problems on the freeway.
----end aside----
As you can see by the pictures I’ve attached below, there is a house on the freeway. I assure you that these pictures were taken under the safest, DJDT* approved conditions.
I’m encouraging all of my readers to use this as their excuse the next time they are late for work. Please feel free to download the pictures onto your own computer, and then put them on the memory card of your camera so that you can pretend like you actually took them when you explain to your boss that there was house on the freeway and that’s why you were late to work. Try not to let little details like not having to take the freeway to get to work, or maybe not having a car at all discourage you from using this excuse. The mere fact that you have those pics on your camera should be enough to convince even the most suspicious of bosses out there that your story is legit. Please leave your success stories about how you totally duped your boss in the comments. I’m sure we’ll all enjoy reading them.
*Driving Jon’s Dad’s Truck
