It
seems as if we have award program for just about every
thing you can think of these days doesn’t it? We have so
many movie and television awards I can’t keep track of
them all. Every day the papers are full of photographs and
gushing descriptions of all of these celebrities accepting
some trophy of some kind.
Who knows all of these people? I don’t, most of them I’ve
never heard of or would recognize if they walked into the
room and said hello.
So much for that…
What I’d like to see would be an awards show for the good
old American workers in various industries. You know, some
kind of a trophy for the greatest plumber or electrician.
Something along those lines.
I got to thinking about an awards program designated just
for road crews. I think an annual award program for those
guys would make a lot of sense and could be very
entertaining. In my opinion it would go something like
this:
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to the 9th Annual Road
Construction Hall of Fame Awards. Tonight we’re pleased to
announce the winner of our Charles P. Rudabaker Traffic
Cone Placement trophy. As you know, Mr. Rudabaker invented
the first traffic cones in 1914, just months after the
first automobiles started showing up on our nations
highways and roadways. Mr. Rudabaker’s first road cone was
made out of concrete and had a short life, but was soon
replaced with newer versions, which served their purpose.
In an interview with Mr. Rudabaker, he stated that he
never thought the road cone business would be so
successful, since he had accidentally invented them one
snowy afternoon in Buffalo, New York. If you’ll remember
he made his first invention to divert road traffic around
a vegetable garden he was plowing over. The state highway
commissioner happened by and contracted with Mr. Rudabaker
on the spot and the rest is history.
Well, enough of that. This year’s winner is Harvey Snidley
of Basketville, Oklahoma. Mr. Snidley breaks his own
record with his feat of laying out over seven miles of
traffic road cones in advance of a stretch of roadwork of
approximately 41 feet. Mr. Snidley effectively tied up the
east side of a major interstate highway for over fifteen
hours in one single cone laying operation. Traffic was
reduced to one lane for these seven miles and the maximum
speed attained during those fifteen hours by any vehicle
was three and one half miles per hour. At times the
traffic backup stretched for over fifteen miles. Mr.
Snidley also deserves extra credit for his innovation in
picking a stretch of highway, which had no on-off ramps
thereby eliminating any persons from leaving the highway.
Mr. Snidley is a credit to his profession and is
represented tonight by his wife since he is recovering at
a local hospital from a road rage attack last week. It
seems he was trying to beat his own record again by going
for the super bowl of cone laying and had gotten up at 3am
one morning to lay out an all time high of ten miles of
traffic cones. A group of retired city employees from
Michigan driving RV’s became irate after crawling through
almost eight and a half miles of cones without seeing any
construction workers. They happened upon poor Harvey
laying out the rest of his record-breaking spread and the
story gets confusing at this point. Most of the RV drivers
are out on bail awaiting trial and Mr. Snidley is expected
to recover in a few weeks. I’m sure he would have loved to
be with us, but we hope to see him next year.
Our next award goes to the foreman who supervises the most
number of road workers but with the least number of men
actually at work. This year’s winner is Marvin Fripps of
Tucson, Arizona. Mr. Fripps achieved the unbelievable
record of forty-five crewmen standing around, leaning on
their shovels or sleeping in their trucks while one man
was actually performing any construction work. This
record-breaking event took place near Bosley, Colorado
when Mr. Fripps and his crew were in the process of
building a large sewer drainpipe across a major interstate
highway. This event was widely publicized by several
network news teams who were being held up by the almost
dead to a stop traffic. Mr. Fripps explanation to the news
reporters was that “It was his opinion that only one man
was needed to perform any work at that point in time and
he did not care to comment any further. Further more if
the news teams wanted to move along then they had better
do so since they were about to lay out more traffic cones
which might delay their journey another four or five
hours.”
Well, of course this isn’t real…but then again maybe it
could be..
