Awards

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.