Back in the bad old days every road project had its police detail to direct traffic and drink coffee. This was back when unionized police were a Democrat constituency and providing them with perks like this kind of detail was a fringe benefit of the job. And all things being equal a cop at one of these road restrictions meant that the drivers would pay attention.
But cops make a lot of money and as Democrats shifted their patronage priorities to illegal aliens and transgender grade school teachers it occurred to them that they could save a lot of money by letting the construction workers take care of the traffic by designating one or two “flag men.” And for the most part this worked pretty well. The workers probably divvied up the flag work to give themselves a break over the course of the day. Since they had a handle on when to stop traffic for various phases of the work and since they were mostly capable human beings the traffic was handled relatively efficiently.
Recently I think flag man has been broken out as a separate job. They seem to be assigning relatively stupid people to this assignment. Now granted, it doesn’t take much to flip a sign around from STOP to SLOW. But you do have to coordinate with another person and understand the risks involved. And lately things haven’t been going as well. Several times in the last few months I’ve happened upon a road work site where the flag man wasn’t even trying. Once he held his sign on SLOW while the other sign read the same thing. He was talking to one of the workers and not even looking at the road. Luckily for me I was paying attention to the traffic coming from the other direction and anticipated.
I was thinking of saying something or reporting it to the state but then I realized. Who am I kidding? This was some diversity hire. He wasn’t a construction worker he was a DEI check mark. My complaint would be considered a hate crime. The smart play would be to confirm the traffic flow myself from now on at one of these work sites.
But now we’ve reached the final stage of flag depreciation, flag girl. Lately all the flag holders are women. Now you might think that this doesn’t pose any additional risk. After all there were several male flag holders that displayed extreme disregard for the safety of the drivers. But women present a different challenge. As I’ve learned from Camera Girl, women have a different spatial sense than men. Back in the old days before GPS we used things called road maps to find our way along the American highway system. And occasionally I would use Camera Girl as my map man on a trip. Now she is a very intelligent woman. But for some reason I could ask her which fork in the road I should take and after looking at the map she would say right and then point left! This can be a terrifying and dangerous situation if there are only a few seconds to react.
So, imagine one of these flag girls standing there flipping this sign from STOP to SLOW or vice versa and the driving public at the mercy of her sense of direction and her feminine logic. It’s enough to make you want to give up driving.
But soon artificial intelligence will save us. Robots will take over this function and then we’ll really have something to worry about. Well, whatever else they do I hope they put a beard on the robot just to be sure. You can’t be too careful.