I was over by Edenton the other day and there’s a sign on NC-17 that says:

TRUCKS FOLLOW US-NC ROUTES THRU EDENTON

My question is why was “thru” abbreviated? There wasn’t a space issue on the sign. Is this an attempt by our benevolent government to save 30 cents a sign? If that’s the case why was routes abbreviated to “RTS”? I think it might be because they have idiots working for the Department of Transportation. Why, you ask? I’ll give you another example. In every weigh station in the state there’s a sign just before the scale that says:

TRUCKERS

DO NOT!

BRAKE HARD

WHILE ON SCALE

I’ll let the lack of a definite article go for now. A lot of jack booted sign making nazis do that because, apparently, they think it sounds more authoritative. That said, can anybody who made it past the 3rd grade not recognize how wrong the punctuation is? Apparently, the sign geniuses at North Carolina DOT can’t.

Let me start by saying that this post should really have a picture for you to get the full effect but the one that I took was really blurry because the roads suck so much over by Statesville……

Anyhow, there’s a Weigh Station on I-40 over by Statesville, NC. The westbound side has been closed for replacement for a while. For those of you that don’t have to deal with these sorts of things on a regular basis, every Weigh Station in NC has a sign near the entrance that say OPEN in big green letters or CLOSED in big red letters. Even if you can read you can tell from the color, right? And you can see the color waaaaaaayyyyyyy out in the distance.

So some genius at DOT decided that the truckers riding through NC needed some extra help. They put out one of those big baby-diarrhea flashing yellow traffic warning signs. You know the ones… they typically say something like LEFT LANE CLOSED AHEAD and are followed by dozens of miles of not-closed left lane. At any rate, this thing is on the side of the road and says

SCALES CLOSED. PROCEED WITH CAUTION

The thing is this sign is visible and readable exactly 4 seconds before you can see the red lights at the entrance to the scale. Some of you are probably thinking what’s the BFD? It’s this: that thing has been out there for at least 2 months and it uses some sort of energy to run 24 hours a day. It has a finite life that is being frittered away to no end.

It was taken and placed there by a crew. From my observations, that means it was towed there from someplace in a heavy truck by 2 guys and followed by a support crew (or something) of 2 in a pickup truck. They then spent an hour setting it up during which time they left both vehicles running. And then they drove back to wherever they originally came from. You right, in the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal but multiplied by hundreds of such occurences a year it turns into real money.

And that money comes from the taxpayers of North Carolina.