Inverted Information

Despite what the Ten Commandments might say about coveting thy neighbor's stuff, I happen to think a little jealousy regarding your neighbors is a good and healthy thing. I'm not saying you should spend your days staring at their house complaining that it seems like they have all the nice things, just that seeing your neighbor's shiny new car and wanting one of your own can make for really solid motivation. It's that impulse to keep up with the Jones which stops houses from falling in to disrepair and keeps lawns neatly trimmed (there really is no other reason to mow a lawn). Hell, there is a very good case to be made that people trying to rub their possessions in other people's faces is the only reason social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest exist. If that wasn't their purpose people would be a lot more eager to show their failures or rough drafts, yet if those sites are to be believed everyone's life is amazing and every project turned out perfectly on the very first try. As long as you don't cross the line and start taking things which don't belong to you than I don't see the harm in turning into a little green-eyed monster every now and again. Still, there is something which is only slightly sadder than taking someone's prized possession and that is trying to make your own version of it.

Don't worry, I'm not about to talk poorly about things which are individually made in a home. I think too many people are quick to buy things they should know how to make and in a lot of cases products which are done one at a time and with the care that can only come from knowing the person who will eventually use it, the product will actually be of better quality than the ones which were mass produced by a stranger in a factory. Where it goes wrong is when a person aims too high in comparison to their ability to make the object of their desires. There are few things quite as sad as when people make their own ghetto version of an expensive product and then try and act like they are comparable. It's is like the person who buys a Mazda two-seater and keeps saying how it looks like a Porsche. No, it looks like a Mazda and trying to hang with the Porsche crowd just looks a little pathetic. I don't want people to become slaves to labels because most of the time there is no difference between the high and low-end stuff, but occasionally price does equal quality. (There is a reason no one makes knock-off cars just yet.) If you can't quite pull yourself up to equal standing sometimes it is just better to accept the level you are at. A crappy car is still better than taking the bus. What I never realized is that this kind of neighborly envy can also happen in someplace like the public works department.

If you have ever driven down a long stretch of highway where the wind can really blow you have probably seen that they will write the road warnings on the pavement rather than put them on regular signs because signs can take flight and become projectiles. Also, it makes it much harder for young rapscallions to steal the signs or vandalize them in some other way. But taking into account that drivers would be zipping down the road at 65 mph road workers will cleverly write them in reverse order and about a hundred yards apart. So you would eventually see the message to Slow... Down but it would take a while. It's a cool concept, but it just doesn't work everywhere. The other day I was traveling through Dedham center when I came to an intersection that has a popular and busy turn. To try and keep traffic flowing as best as possible the town wants cars to keep the intersection clear and wrote that message on the road. The problem is that unlike a highway department which has miles of asphalt to space their message out on with the town of Dedham only had about 50 feet of road to get their message across. Thus you could see the whole message in one glance and since you were slow going through the intersection anyway drivers had plenty of time to read it like a normal road sign, which is what I did. The resulting message of "BLOCK NOT DO" was more confusing than helpful. It was as if Yoda was trying to tell me something but hadn't quite got the message right.

There are plenty of road warnings where the message has to be condensed due to lack of space on the sign and it can result in confusion. That is totally understandable - when you only have so much room to work with it is reasonable to expect 'crosswalk' to be cut down (not sure how they arrived Ped-Xing though). But here the people giving road directions had plenty of space to work with so they didn't need to edit the message or even write it in any special way. They could have written it smaller and with more words if they felt like it, but they didn't. That means they did it the way they did just because they thought it looked cool. I bet they thought they would get all sorts of compliments and instead I bet they have gotten a few calls from people wondering why they had messed it up like that. This is what can happen when you over-think a problem and compare it to the most extreme version of a solution. And that's the point - it's nice to have things to aspire to, but there comes a time when you have to be realistic about what you will be able to accomplish give your circumstances. You can compare your raft to your neighbor's bass boat, not a cruise liner. Obviously, that is an individual standard but as a rule of thumb if people are too distracted figuring out what your sign is trying to tell them that they almost get in an accident than it is pretty safe to say you probably went a little too far with your effort.