Small Town News

Jan 15, 2009 10:02

I've all but lost my voice (which has only happened to me once three years ago) but that may go at any minute so writing is my best means of communication at the moment ( Read more... )

randomness, star lake, home

Leave a comment

shannon_elaine January 15 2009, 18:33:51 UTC
The whole town I grew up in had less than 400 people. Still does actually. It's way tiny and everyone knows everyone else or is related somehow. This is my favorite story from living there:

One fact can not be disputed: Winter weather either brings out the best or the worst in people. Another fact, which might be disputed, is that
we have the majority of the "worst" people. The prairie winds have been blowing hard and strong, and it is so cold that the sign at the Bank of Versailles can't tell us how cold it is in Celsius. (The lady at the bank said that their thermometer "can't do subtraction.")
It got so bad, that one night there were only 5 shoppers in WalMart and only one truck in front of the local bar. Families huddled together, seeking comfort and safety from the storm... for two days straight. After two days, the weather didn't get any better; people just couldn't
stand to be stuck with their families anymore. Businesses re-opened and people went back to work, in spite of the fact that there wasn't any place to park.
In Downtown Versailles, they temporarily plow the snow into the middle of the road, to avoid piling up snow on the sidewalks.
In theory, drivers are supposed to use the street-side parking spaces as traffic lanes. There are good points and bad points to this theory.
The biggest problem is that some people simply can not rationalize that, if they park in one of the parking spaces that they just used for driving to said parking space, no one else can drive past them. To alleviate this problem, the city plowed open the Downtown Parking Lot,
in hopes that people would park there and walk on the sidewalks. On the "Good" side, the long piles of snow down the center of each street make nice barricades between the two lanes of traffic, and motorists who loose control of their vehicles will either be stopped by the wall of plowed snow or careen across the sidewalk.
As a motorist, I find this to be a suitable form of protection. As a pedestrian, this is like playing Dodge-Ball with a real Dodge, and I will not walk on the sidewalks until all of the snow is removed from the streets and dumped elsewhere. Which leads to this year's problem.
It seems that the Versailles Board of Alderman, in their infinite wisdom, decided to free up some if the city's monetary resources by selling pieces of property that it owned.... including the lot where they used to dump the snow that was removed from the middle of the
streets... an oversight that was not noticed until it was time to dump the snow somewhere. The solution: dump the snow in the recently cleared Downtown Parking Lot. (If cities are places of perpetual motion, it's because they are going in circles!)
Meanwhile, back at the radio station, we were warning people of an impending storm... but nobody listened. Every business around the lake was open, and the Holiday Shoppers were moving through stores in Blitzkrieg fashion. And then the freezing rain started falling. Some of the Holiday Shoppers, the ones whose backbones are not made of Platinum Gold, raced for the safety of their homes. The frozen streets and ditches were soon dotted with SUVs and minivans that were no longer pointing in the right direction.
The Camden County Sheriff's Office called the radio station, asking for our assistance. They had more accidents than emergency personnel, and they wanted us to advise all of our listeners that it was not safe to drive. Wanting to help, we told our listeners what you just read in the previous two sentences... almost verbatim. Within 1 hour, every business that listened to our station had called us to say that they were closing and going home... because it was too dangerous outside.
I am still having a bit of trouble trying to figure out their line of thinking: "I am driving home because it isn't safe to drive." This sounds about as logical to me as the sky-divers who die in a plane crash, with a parachute on their back, because they were "too low to
jump." I guess we tend to overlook the obvious. And me? I drive to work, just so I can tell everybody that it isn't safe to drive. Go figure!

Reply

niblet81 January 15 2009, 20:14:32 UTC
haha that is amazing. small towns are the shit. :)

Reply


Leave a comment

Up