just a passing thought

this moment brought to you by "the morning commute"

it sure is nice to have all 3 lanes open on I-4 the whole time i'm on it for both directions of my commute. as i was breezing along down the highway toward work this morning, enjoying the wide-open feeling of no more orange barrels or concrete barriers crowding my lane, it crossed my mind that so many people who travel this stretch of I-4 have whined & moaned about how long it took for the construction to be completed. it made me laugh to myself.

see...they began this little expansion project to add the third lane & do some necessary ramp reconstruction in January 2003. if you count with me, faithful readers, that would be about 2 1/2 years ago. the work is scheduled to be completed in its entirety in late 2005/early 2006. that would be 3 years max. beginning to end. sure it had its moments of inconvenience. like when they shut down entire ramps. or when they condensed all traffic down to one lane. at 7:30am. but!! there were crews working various jobs, virtually round the clock, 6, sometimes 7 days a week. and WORKING. if they were standing around it was very obvious that they were discussing some instructions or taking a quick break (usually sitting right on their piece of construction equipment) but more often than not, what you saw were road crews actually laboring in the scalding FL sun & the thick humidity. sometimes even in the rain. (unless you have experienced FL rain, you can't appreciate what i'm saying when i say they worked IN the rain. FL rain is frequently in likeness to a monsoon. you can't see a darn thing, you look like a drowned rat in under 8 seconds & it comes down so hard it HURTS.) and even more than seeing the road crews working, you actually saw real progress. sometimes just from one commute to the next. the whole thing would look different. and now the work is almost done, the lanes are all open, the ramps nearing completion & even the "landscaping" along the highway has been so much improved. the whole commute is so much more pleasant.

yet i hear those complaints. those rants about what a pain it's all been & how long it took. and i have to laugh to myself. why? well...i'm from CT. if you're from CT. or have been to CT a few times. or even happen to be from the surrounding area. you know about I-95. and you totally understand why a 3-year highway improvement project that is completed right on schedule & does what it was intended to do is a beautiful thing. if you are unfamiliar with the CT highway to which i refer, i'll just say this: I-95 has been under repair for as long as i have been alive. possibly even longer than that. there are always crews that appear to be on a perpetual coffee break. for 30 years. or they are standing around staring at something on the ground. i have news for them. if they haven't figured it out after 3 decades, they're in the wrong line of work.

my point--and yes i DO have one lol--3 years of mild inconvenience while they successfully make the highway more capable of handling the traffic that travels it & subsequently making MY commute much less stressful is not something i find worth bitching about. you want to bitch about highway construction, move to central CT & work in the southeastern coastal section so that you have no choice but to use I-95 5 days a week. i think you'll find that the FL DOT is way more efficient than you give them credit for!