Show of hands: of those of you who are not from the Buffalo area, who has referred to a highway using "the" before coming to UB? In my hometown, we never said things like "take the 81" or "merge onto the 17." That would sound silly. However, here in the greater Buffalo area you will commonly hear people talking about the backup on "the 33" and complaining about tolls on "the 90," and for some reason it sounds perfectly normal.
I took to wondering how all this nonsense started and realized that it's quite acceptable and not silly at all to say the thruway. Since the thruway is also interstate 90, maybe people started referring to it as the 90 and then generalized this to the rest of the area highways. Lord knows there are enough 90s in Western New York to warrant confusion to start with. It's spooky to note that while the 33 is not a 90, if you multiply 3 times 3 you will get nine, as the honor students among you may have already guessed.
If you want a good laugh, the next time someone from out of town asks you for directions, give the following instructions. Your victim must be coming from downtown for this to work. "Take the 190 North to the 290 West, and then get on the 90 East. From the 90 get on 390 South, stop and have lunch in Rochester, then get on the 390 North. Take the 90 West to 290 East, and then take the 990."
Tell him or her to get off the 990 on Sweet Home Road next to Colonie Apartments so that I can have a laugh, too. I'll be waiting outside selling overpriced maps that I will draw with whiteboard markers on plastic wrap. This gag will probably take a good two or three hours to complete, and will cost the poor sap about five bucks in tolls. The best part is the inevitable confusion the 90s will cause at some point, resulting in your target getting lost.
Two or three hours is actually a generous estimate, given the appalling amount of construction on our highways these days. If you think your tuition bill is steep, think about how many road cones you've seen over the summer, and ask yourself how much of New York State taxpayers' money was spent to purchase them (never mind the cost of the actual construction).
Where do all the road cones go in the winter? Do they fly south? Does some sentimental construction worker take them home and keep them in his garage(s)? I think it'd be worth the effort to organize a team of delinquents to stack them all in the governor's office late one night.
In the interest of being economically efficient, I think resources devoted to researching alternative uses for the road cone would be well spent. Perhaps our weapons engineers could make a "road cone launcher" that would spew spiraling orange bullets of death. I think we all know how expensive bombs are these days. Imagine the casualties that would result from five tons of road cone being dropped onto a city from 10,000 feet. If nothing else, the enemy would be neutralized because traffic would come to a standstill.
I wonder if the citizens of Iraq go to work every day and are reminded by Arabic letters scrawled in a childish hand to slow down because someone's daddy is working on the road. Have we all seen those signs? Clearly, someone working for or commissioned by the New York State Department of Transportation is wasting marketing ingenuity on signs that make us all feel guilty for speeding.
Whoever it is could be raking in millions working for Microsoft or R.J. Reynolds and making us all feel guilty for not buying things that are bad for us. "Don't quit smoking, my mommy works at the tobacco plant!" or "Don't use Netscape, Bill bought my class a computer!"
Completely aside from the already inane topic, no one took me up on my offer of a free Burger King meal that I presented two weeks ago in exchange for an original radio station name. That's the kind of apathy and the lack of creativity I should have expected from you schmucks. That's OK, I'll just buy myself a burger (or two) and some (large) fries, and then I can blame it on you folks when I need a triple bypass before my 22nd birthday.
