Bergen County, especially Englewood is in a perennial state of repair. By repair, I mean digging up the streets and closing roads in such a way that to go one mile, you practically need a tank of gas. Forgive the hyperbole but it gets more than tiresome.
Even worse, when they finally finish and pave the street, PSEG digs it up again to fix a gas or electric line which naturally re-closes the road.
I remember as a kid, we lived on a street in Brooklyn with a noisy trolley running in front. When the day came that they were going to change it to a bus line, we were overjoyed.
But the city government must have contracted to repair the trolley tracks. At the time, is was hard to tell if it was a mistake, or if somebody was paid off for the contract. So I watched, one day, in front of our house, they were replacing the trolley tracks with new ones. Simultaneously, following them one block back they were removing the freshly installed new tracks and fixing the road for the buses.
But I digress. Back to Bergen County. If it’s not one thing it’s another. You would think that the police would at least try to indicate an escape route for the cars blocked by the workers. Sometimes they try, but this time there was nothing but road closed signs no matter which direction we went.
This reminded me of an incident in Italy some years ago. We were driving from Milan, where we lived, up to the mountains on the road along the east side of Lake Como when the traffic was abruptly stopped by a landslide on the road. We were the second car in the line and we were routed up into the hills. But there were no signs and we were all following the lead car who looked like he knew what he was doing. After about fifteen minutes, we followed the speeding leader right into the driveway of a house. The driver, apparently angry, got out of the car and tersely with the help of the Italian equivalent of four letter words, asked the old woman sweeping the driveway (It loses something in the translation) “Where do I go?” She looked up and said the equivalent of, “How the f*** should I know?” We eventually found our way but that scene recurs in my head often.
My final comment is that I periodically receive emails from PSEG asking, “How are we doing?” It takes strong discipline to erase the email without answering it.