In the three and a half years I’ve lived in south Florida, I’ve done my fair share of griping about the roads. While the traffic does suck during the season, the traffic is not really worth bitching about—because the traffic is caused by something else, and that something is the roads and all things related. Mistimed lights, woefully undersized roads, a complete lack of routes through town other than a few major (more like majorly clogged) thoroughfares…it all contributes to hair-pulling frustration for six to eight months out of every year.

Season. When all the honkies from up north come down and rub our faces in the poop as a reminder that, without their royal tourist dollars, we would be nothing but a swamp. Full-time residents sigh, bend over and take it up the ass as all the people from afar come down and hog the services, restaurants cater to tourists only, roads become impassible, it becomes impossible to do your grocery shopping before 11 p.m., and there’s general animosity everywhere. How anyone can claim to actually enjoy vacationing in this town is beyond me. To me it would be like deliberately taking time off to go somewhere and stress out. What in the hell is the point of that?

…But back to the roads. For a time, I complained because nothing seemed to be getting done about them. They’re too small and there’s too few of them, and all the old people who don’t drive anymore anyway don’t want more roads built because it will ruin the “character” of this town (which has already been done, in my opinion). And since they’re the rich ones, they’ve gotten their way for years—and as a result, our infrastructure is dangerously inadequate. If a hurricane were to come in and smack us down, we would all die here. There is no way 60-odd thousand people could all get out of dodge on a two-line highway. No way at all. But money is what matters, so nothing happened.

Finally, though, some progress has started to be made. In the last year, major road projects have been announced. We’re all getting reamed in taxes for it, but I don’t care because this is one time when taxes actually do some good for the community and I’m happy to pay them if it means our roads will be improved. But once the work actually got started, boy, we were all reminded once again that everything down here in this neck of the woods moves at a snail’s pace.

In any metropolitan area, such as where I used to live in Michigan, if a contractor came to the Department of Transportation and said it was going to take FIVE YEARS to widen a two-mile-long stretch of road, they would be laughed the hell out of the office. Not here. Because that’s exactly what’s going on. And it’s not hard to see why. You go down one of these roads that are being widened, and you barely see three people working on them. You see them sitting in backhoes that are turning in circles, as if the driver forgot to take his Haldol and now thinks he’s about to take the checkered flag in the International Race of Backhoes. (IROB, anyone?) I simply cannot believe how lazy, incompetent and flat-out retarded public service departments are down here. Absolutely nothing ever gets done without it taking years upon years, and of course, millions upon millions of dollars.

So it’s no wonder that road projects here are so goddamned expensive. If you’re paying a bunch of workers by the hour for FIVE YEARS to widen a road, your county coffers are going to be empty! Why does no one hold these assholes to a higher standard? The fact that the county commissioners say nothing about this leads the average citizen to believe that they A) don’t care about the budget and B) don’t care if the county, and therefore the taxpaying citizens, are getting screwed. Thanks a bunch, guys. Glad we elected ya.

Anyway, I suppose I should get to the real subject of this update, shouldn’t I? Indeed I should. Well, I thought the state of our road projects was pretty sorry before, but yesterday’s incident and its repurcussions absolutely take the cake. During yet more of this neverending road widening yesterday on US 41, the #1 major thoroughfare (and in some places, only thoroughfare) north and south through this part of the state, the idiotic workers struck a natural gas line and completely busted it open. The result? US 41 was suddenly closed down for a stretch of about two miles—COMPLETELY CLOSED DOWN—in the middle of evening rush hour.

Traveling about 15 miles to their homes, many people from my office found themselves sitting in traffic for greater than three hours.

Tempers were flaring. Cars were ramming into each other. People were jumping out from behind the wheel and shouting, screaming and heckling the road crews. Cars were cutting through parking lots and racing down tiny residential streets, since there literally is not a single other road that could take them around the gas line fracture. A local apartment building was evacuated due to the dangerous gas leak. The local paper detailed the chaos here.

So now, instead of widening the road, we’re all going to be paying mega moolah to have these idiots fix the damn gas line that they broke. Until that happens, the county’s only major route north, US 41, will remain completely closed off. And how long do these industrious road crews say it will take them to fix the problem? TWO WEEKS.

Two weeks to fix a gas line? Two weeks for a major US route to be entirely closed off? WHAT IN THE FUCK ARE YOU IDIOTS TRIPPING ON?

In my mind’s eye I see a picture of a bunch of TECO gas company blowhards stumbling around the road during rush hour, scratching their butts and looking at the gas pipe like it’s nothing they’ve ever seen before. I see road workers with shovels smoking cigarettes and staring at the mess they’ve made like it’s amusing. And I see everybody just standing there and doing nothing for hours at a time, days on end. Because I honest and truly cannot imagine any other way that this repair would logically take TWO FRIGGIN’ WEEKS to take place.

Of the drivers who chose to divert down residential streets as a means to get around the chaos, one of our clearly educated local residents remarked, “If you have all that traffic going no place, it�s got to go someplace, which is no place. That�s why I tell anybody and everybody, don�t do it.”

Huh? You want to take that bong out of your mouth and try saying that again?

All I can say is, I’m certainly glad that my wife and I are going to be leaving this place on Saturday and going on vacation for a week. Else I might find my brain soaking up the idiocy like a sponge. Or the natural gas, at least.