One for us Yankees...
'Twas the 1980s, in Rochester NY that this took place. A sad tale of road construction...

For those of you overseas, a bit of explanation first. We have various levels of government here, as you do there. There's the federal level, then state level, then county level, then town or city level. And each of these levels of government has its jurisdiction, and they rarely if ever communicate with one another.

So one day I had to go across downtown Rochester, from my sister's house to my father's office. Normally it was a pretty direct route that took about 20 minutes along some fairly main roads, so I trotted off happily enough.

Then I hit my first obstacle: road work that has shut down the main (state owned) road, detouring traffic down a side (county owned) road.

All was fine until I hit the second obstacle: road work on the county-owned road, resulting in a detour down a small city-owned road. The traffic was far heavier than that road had ever been intended for, so it was rather slow going, but it moved along until...

The third obstacle: the city was tearing up that street, and funneling the traffic through one of the more obscure blocks of downtown Rochester.

Not one of these highway departments had bothered to check with the others. We had the Perfect Storm, resulting in a lot of cars filtering through back streets like water through a sponge.

By this time I was in an area of the city I had never before entered, and with good reason. Let's just say that it was not one of the more prosperous sections of town, the roads were as smooth as an old limestone quarry, and the local residents were looking increasingly angry to have so much traffic flowing through the 'hood. As I'm blond with grey eyes, I was especially unwelcome there, if you know what I mean. Racism tends to run both ways, and I was very much the minority there. No one attacked me physically, but I heard a lot of things growled as I drove by.

It took me over an hour to get through there. By the time I got to Dad's office, I decided it was reasonable to go get some beer first.

Twats.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 26 Jul 2007, 22:49, Reply)