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Monday, Dec. 23, 2002 - 8:12 p.m. I heard the following promotional voiceover on the Weather Channel this morning: �The official sponsor of the first day of winter is Sears!� Is there NOTHING left that can�t be bought by a major corporation? The first day of a SEASON? Who do they pay for this right? Jack Frost? Old Man Winter? And what was Sears thinking? If we have a really hard winter, I know one company who WON�T be getting my business! (end of silly rant...) I hadn�t even had time to sit down in my comfy chair at work when the phone rang this morning. It was the dispatcher for the city (Nina, a happy sort of person, I think, from my conversations with her on the phone). She said that she had numerous calls about a traffic hazard on our main city highway on the north side of town. What was this hazard? According to her, it was large bags of fertilizer. What type, she didn�t know. All she did was pass on what the motorists (plus one police officer) had reported to her. I tracked down Tink (who is the Roadrunner again for the last few days before he retires), and sent him towards the scene. As soon as he arrived, he called the storage, requesting that a TMA (crash barrier truck) be sent out. The bags were covering two lanes. That�s a lot of fertilizer! I had visions of free plant food running through my head all morning. I wouldn�t need to buy any fertilizer for a decade, if that�s what was in the bags. Unfortunately, it wasn�t fertilizer. It was �Deluxe Kitty Litter, with odor-absorbing crystals!�. Big difference between the two. The only thing that the two have in common is they are sold in bags, and that they look a similar from a distance. It took 4 people to gather up all of the unopened bags, and to broom the broken bag�s contents to the gutter. Since our sweeper was �down� today, the loose stuff is still in the gutter until tomorrow, when it will either be swept up, or plowed into the median. Yeah, I said �plowed�. I watched the weather forecasts all weekend, and they never mentioned an accumulating snow for this week. Maybe a little flurry activity on Christmas Eve, but nothing that would bother traveling motorist. Now? We are in the northern edge of a major winter storm, with 1� to 3� on the ground between early tomorrow morning and tomorrow evening. The counties to the south ( one of which contains my Big Fishing Lake) are in a band of 4� to 8�! That�s a lot more snow than �flurries�! I have been lucky through the years, never totally missing a Christmas celebration with my family. I might have to eat a little early, or we might have to open our presents Christmas morning after I plow snow all night (if I can keep my eyes open, that is). It isn�t what I want, but it is why we are employed by the North Dakota Department of Transportation, after all. If it snows heavily and we don�t do our jobs, everyone else would be stranded due to impassable roads. It seems to me that the Christmases that I have worked, the traveling public goes out of their way to honk their horns and wave at me. Most seem to appreciate what we are doing, trying to keep the roads open for them. The ones who give me the one finger salute? The angry people who hate me and my truck because I haven�t cleared the roads yet, or because I don�t push the snow at 65 miles per hour? After the blow by me, and they are (inevitably) stuck in the ditch a few miles down the road, what do I do? If I can stop, I always call the towing company of their choice for them�� So�what are we planning on doing with all of that Kitty Litter? If the owner of this mess calls us, they can come and claim their property. They will also be billed by the NDDOT for the manpower and equipment involved in the cleanup. Some insurance companies pay for it, sometimes the truck�s owner is forced to swallow the fees. Most of the time, nobody bothers claiming the lost parcels. Considering the low cost of Kitty Litter (even if it is �Deluxe, with odor absorbing crystals!�), I doubt they want to claim it. The total of un-opened bags was around 50. If nobody claims it, it�s finders/keepers. In this case, it will be used by the storage to help stretch our dwindling supply of oil-dry product (used to clean up fluid spills in the shop). If you put a cup of each product in separate containers, you wouldn�t be able to tell them apart. Well, maybe you could if you used each to clean urine from the bathroom floor�.. If I can�t get time to post another entry before then, I hope you all have a stress-free, Merry Christmas. I�ll have my sleep deprived family celebration a little later than normal. Better late than never �. In case the �Storm of the Century� misses us (weather forecasters are never wrong, are they?), ignore the last two sentences�����
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