sign shortage

The construction crew in front of my home doesn’t have any no parking signs to put up (though they will run your plates and threaten to tow your car if you are parked there past the [arbitrary] time they need to do their work). My route to work has several construction sites that seem to be on some sort of random or rotating schedule. Occasionally, they block off the road with cones and a sign with “Road Closed” spray-painted on the back of some other sign. There never seem to be any detour signs, though. Instead, there’s a line of cars pulling up to a cop who’s doing a lot of pointing and head-shaking. They get paid too much, anyway, at least he’s earning some of it, I guess. Who is in charge of the signage around construction sites? Is it the crews or the town or the local police? Is someone just dropping the ball or are there so many construction sites that there is a sign shortage? I bet I could get the kids at the teen center to make detour and no parking signs for these sites… even with the appropriate arrows and hours and other such details.

Or maybe there is an abundance of kids who steal road signs, like I did when I was a kid. I don’t remember exactly when the bug hit us to become vandals and hooligans..but one of our earliest adventures involved one of those signs with the removable letters and the big blinking arrow on top. We wrote down what it said earlier in the day and tried to come up with the funniest/meanest thing that we could rearrange it to say. I believe we decided on “bud’s pussy con-man” and did succeed in changing at least one side of the sign to read exactly that. Anytime a car came around the corner, we’d run over to the building to hide. One of those times, I definitely stepped into a big whole and cut the back of my leg. We also used a dremel tool to alter a wrench so that it would fit the bolt on those blinking lights on top of the orange barrels. We had quite a collection of those. There was one “No Passing Zone” sign that we couldn’t quite reach, so we tried getting someone on someone else’s shoulders to get it, but when they leaned out to steady themselves on the sign, the whole thing just fell over. I remember trying to hide that sign by wrapping it up in my coat, but much to our surprise, that triangular sign had much broader shoulders than my coat would allow. I think there’s still a small collection of signs and blinking lights and such up in the barn behind Mom’s house. I think there’s actually one of those giant orange barrels up there, too. A metal one, not one of those cheap plastic ones… and there’s definitely a few road cones, as well.