Wednesday, October 11, 2006

The right way (or the highway)

I'm so sick of I-75 that I've sworn off using it in the foresee-able future (especially going to/from school).

Going down to class the past couple of weeks, the traffic has been pretty heavy, and sometimes I've had to watch out for very slow or stopped traffic, but last Thursday, going down to college, I was stuck for over an hour making me late for class by about an hour. Then, yesterday, I just happened to be up in the morning (well, actually I stayed up night, but that's another issue). I saw a news story about a 7-car accident on I-75 causing delays, so I took that into account when I was finally ready to go down to campus and found alternate routes off of the highway if there was any sign of traffic. Well, there was none, so I kept on right through, though there was no shortage of asshole drivers.

Well, after being up (and having done a rigorous exercise routine earlier in the day), I barely made it through my professor's boring lecture, so I was absolutely ready to go home as quick as possible and I've never had any problem going I-75 North from Dayton, so I thought I'd be fine. Boy, was I wrong!

At about the Needmore exit, traffic began piling up and came to a complete stop. This was somewhat understandable as they have been doing construction work on the I-70/I-75 Interchange, and the left-most lane has been closed for a while (though none of the asshole drivers know how to read the sign and expected us to let them in or suffer an accident; I have a guideline: if you don't have your turn-signal on, then you don't get in front of me). This would have made for some sketchy situations as per usual, but tonight both left lanes were closed and they didn't tell us beforehand. So, the lane that I was in was closed as well and, even using my turn-signal, I barely made it over before I absolutely had to change lanes (people don't seem to follow my rule of being courteous to drivers who signal when they change lanes).

I was stuck in traffic for about an hour and it was down to one lane at the I-70/I-75 Interchange, with people merging in making it even more dangerous. Then, when the whole merging over business was done with, traffic seemed to pick the pace, though we couldn't really go that fast, as the lanes were bordered closely with cones and the lanes were moving past construction workers.

Finally, the construction ended right before the exit I was going to take. I was so frustrated by this inconvenience, but I was glad to past the trouble spot and was dreaming of my couch & bed. Well, the route I was taking was closed due to construction at the railroad tracks, so I had to take a detour north for quite a ways and the next route I could take was at another road with a railroad crossing, which unfortunately had a train crossing it when I finally got up to it. Just one delay after another.

At this time, I had to take a leak really badly, so I put it in reverse and kept on Hyatt and decided to drop in on where my brother's staying, though when it looked like nobody was there, I decided to head to Burger King to use the facilities and get some food. Then, while I was waiting for my food, I must have been standing there for about 15 min., though there there was nobody else in line.

Not all was bad yesterday, though: I saw Dan's friend, Enrique at the Sinclair library (with his Asian classmate he has a crush on). I was able to get my paper done, make copies, though I left my Tartan card in the copy machine and nearly forgot it because I was in such a hurry to finish my paper and make it to class. I noticed it wasn't in my wallet when I was buying Starbucks. Somebody had taken it out of the machine and set it on top. Then, on the way to class, I saw a friend I used to work with at Menlo. I hadn't seen him in months, but I couldn't really stop to talk. I made it to class, and the professor surprising let all us study the terms before our quiz for a few minutes. Without doing so, I would have bombed it worse than I had the previous one.