Tuesday, October 31, 2006

What's on my daylight savings mind

Just a few things on my mind on this gorgeous, sunny, 60-degree Halloween in the world’s greatest city:

Parallel Parking: Have you seen the commercial for the new Lexus with automatic parallel parking? Holy crap! What a great and scary concept. But, I dunno, seems kinda like cheating. When I got my license (many, many moons ago) you had to do 2 specific things to get it beyond general good driving and that was a 3-point turn and parallel parking. If you couldn’t do both, you didn’t pass. It’s actually a bragging rite with some people, being able to squeeze your car into a spot that is no bigger then a phone booth. I know as I talk to people the more rural the area you’re from the less important parallel parking becomes. Where I live, it will always be a part of life; there just aren’t enough wide streets or enough off-street parking. I had a kid I work with say they were going to get rid of parallel parking in Boston. I laugh as I’ve heard that before. I asked, are they going to widen every street in the city to allow for head parking? Maybe tear down all the houses and businesses that are currently built basically up to the curb? So maybe Lexus is on to something. I just hope it has a safety feature that realizes when the person jaywalking across the street between the parked cars and your parallel parking ass is behind you or I smell a lot of lawsuits cooking

Crossing guards: Now before anyone jumps on me I realize this is a necessary and thankless job. Most of these people volunteer their time to make sure kids can safely across busy streets on their way to school and for this I commend them. BUT, there are certain crossing guards that jump over their responsibilities and think they are traffic cops. Not content to simply cross school kids they start crossing the elderly, able-bodied adults and just about anyone needing to cross the street. Even worse, they start directing traffic. You stop, you, go, you, slow down. It’s pretty funny actually. Traffic jammed up for miles while soccer mom’s and dad’s decide how the flow of traffic should go. As you can probably tell, I have one of these screwing up my morning commute big time.

Daylight Savings Time: I don’t understand and I probably don’t want to. I don’t get why some parts of the country set their clocks back and others don’t. Why some individual States don’t do it. All I know is it is now pitch dark by the time I leave work and whilst I have no plans to do anything that requires daylight, it’s simply depressing. I remember as kids our parents told us daylight savings time was so it would be dark for when we went trick or treating so that’s what I’m sticking with.

Happy Halloween everyone!

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