Having grown up in world of the Big Dig, I am quite familiar with road construction projects which take a very long time to finish. There was some of that very construction happening on Route 1 near my house which felt like it had gone on for approximately the last four years. It was a little down the road from Gillette Stadium and crossing over Route 95, so I figured they were widening the bridge for the increased game-day traffic or something along those lines. Every time I had driven through this area they were down to one lane of traffic and at this point I was so used to it I was actually surprised when I rolled through this afternoon and found the project was finally done. After years of delays and reduced speeds there were no cones, workers or police details in sight. Do you know what was left? A bridge. A bridge that very much resembled the one that was there when the whole thing started: no new lanes, not even much wider than before. Basically, nothing changed.
Are you kidding me? It took that long to replace a simple two-lane bridge? Now, I wasn't expecting a loop-de-loop in the middle or anything preposterous like that, but I was expecting it to at least be a slightly fancier bridge than was there previously. Nope. It was a run-of-the-mill bridge: two lanes and barriers on the sides. As I've stated on numerous occasions, I am not a civil engineer, but I'm pretty sure that I could build a bridge in less than four years, especially when I'm essentially just replacing what is already there with new parts. It would be like building a model from a package, just with bigger decals. I can't believe they took this long and didn't make any improvements. At least with the Big Dig we got some new tunnels, a park and a very good ice cream out of the deal.
-Speaking of things with design flaws: last night I was getting some gas at the local station. This particular station is the kind which takes several cents off the per-gallon cost of gas when you pay cash, so it has become almost exclusively a cash-only business as fuel prices have gone up. As a result about a year ago they brought in all new pumps that featured a slot to put your cash into directly and skip walking to the cashier booth. After all, why interact with another human being for three whole seconds? (...he wondered while taking full advantage of the 'pay-at-the-pump' feature like a hypocrite.) Anyway, last night I noticed a pretty severe design flaw with these machines. It rained for all of yesterday and by the time I was at the station last night water was dripping from anywhere it could find a leak. After I inserted my first bill I tried to put in the second one, except the machine wouldn't take any more money until it was done recalculating my gas prices.
This would have been fine if the machine wasn't molded in such a fashion that a ridge created a drip right over the money slot. So, during the two minutes I spent trying to shove my money in it was getting water dripped on it at a fairly steady stream. That would be the first design flaw. The second flaw comes from the fact that the machines do not accept wet bills. So, now the machine had taken some of my money, but not all of it and I was taking so long trying to put the rest of my bills in the machine told me I now had to go see the both attendant. Fine. I gave the guy in the booth the rest of my money and went to pump my gas, only to be called back to the booth over the loudspeaker. Awesome, because what I want is everyone else at this station to think I can't figure out how to pump gas. But, back to the both I went, where I was told by the guy that he couldn't add any more money and I had to pump the $10 I already paid. Alright.
Back to the pump I went, only to find that because I hadn't started pumping gas fast enough the machine had cancelled my transaction. Thus, I went back to the booth a third time where I finally was able to get everything bundled into one transaction, pump my gas and be on my way. To think, the entire process could have taken 1/3 the time if they only thought to put a small piece of plastic on that ridge and funnel the water away. It's a good thing all that time was totally worth the forty cents I saved.
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