Bad Weather & Headlights or: Interstate Elephants on Roller Skates

It’s rainy. It’s cloudy. Visibility is low. And you’re driving a nearly-invisible car. How do you expect to not get hit?

Grrr…

An annoying number of people around here seem to enjoy playing this game. I would like to kindly request that people stop being stupid…and inconsiderate…and careless. An impossible expectation, I know.

It’s been raining in Omaha a fair amount over the last week. When I’ve been out in it, it’s primarily on my way to or back from work. Traffic is slow, but understandably so.

What is not understandable is that when I look, there are some dark patches in the wall of yellow headlights behind me. Are those patches empty pavement where there aren’t any cars in this bumper to bumper traffic? Are they elephants on roller skates merging into the flow of traffic?

They are cars without their headlights on.

On one dreary morning in particular, I remember passing a car whose headlights were off. By the time I was 20 feet ahead, it had completely disappeared from my view. Awesome.

Especially in the city, the primary function of headlights is not so that you can see, but so that other drivers can see you.

A Call to Action

I have automatic headlights that respond to outside darkness; they don’t always turn on in bad weather because there’s just enough light to keep them off. So I manually double check that they’re on and sometimes flip the switch just to be sure.

If you have manual lights, please make sure they’re on. And if you’ve automatic lights like mine, please do the same.

Thank you.

Escalators in Omaha May Be Harmful to Your Mental Health

O! (is for Omaha)

Praises so I don’t seem like such a negative nancy:

• Omaha is a nice mid-sized city to live in
• Omaha schools are pretty okay
• There are 8 Walmarts within 20 minutes of where I live
• Omaha has more restaurants per capita than in any other U.S. city
• Omaha has a ‘skyscraper’
• Omaha has an overpass
• Omaha has hills (unlike the rest of the midwest. Yes, I’m referring to the real midwest. NOT the Ohio, Indiana area. But they’re probably flat too)

Go for the O! Wooo! Now that the prunes have done their work on my positive feelings, let’s get down to business.

The iron horse, sort of

Every day, millions of people jump on escalators that take them where they want to go (though most realize escalators have feelings too and opt for the more considerate, standing/walking approach). They advance to the platform, make the terrifically scary first step onto the steel monster, and get whisked away to lands unknown.

Flying across airports (no longer only for planes!), descending into the bowels of a city’s metro, skipping monumental(ly short) flights of stairs they’ven’t yet trained hard enough to scale, these lemmings know what it’s all about.

Well, most do–except those in Omaha. We have escalators. We use escalators. We are a city of escalatorers that escalate about as well as a drunk monkey solving calculus-based physics problems on a dirty whiteboard with a frozen banana. Does the monkey or the whiteboard have the banana? You decide. Now imagine how bad the problem would seem if I exaggerated.

Walk on the left, stand on the right

A simple item of courtesy. If you want to walk up the escalator because you’re in a hurry or simply detest waiting in line, take the left side of the stair. If you like to stand on the escalator all the way to the top, teasing every last moment out of your experience, take the right.

But please, standers, be considerate and don’t clog up both sides–some people actually want through. I’ve been in places like DC, LA, Toronto, Chicago, and Paris, and they can do it right. We only have a small fraction of their populations, why can’t we?

The universalness of this truth in larger cities makes it perfectly reasonable to tell violators to move over as you’re rushing by. Such is not the case in Omaha. Unfortunately, so few recognize this “rule” that it would come across as very rude if you asked someone to move, even if blood was gushing from a pencil wound in your neck.

Large cities occasionally share some of these problems, however. Unaware “tourists” (probably from Omaha) can mess with things. See someone’s remarks about Washington DC, someone else’s, and the t-shirt campaign to promote awareness.

It’s the journey, not the destination that counts

How true. When escalatoring, everyone generally has the same ultimate goal: get on, go for a ride, and get off.

However, not everybody likes to do it in the same way:

• Some do it slowly (standers)
• Some go quickly (walkers)
• Some like it hard and fast while still taking their time (going the wrong way)
• Some find themselves blindfolded, handcuffed, and face down on the concrete, pinned and ripped at by a curvy dominatrix with a cat o’ nine tails (forgetting to step off and getting pulled under)

But hey, I don’t judge.

Finale

I work with a guy who moved here from Chicago due to a job transfer; he doesn’t like Omaha. Everything else aside, with people always standing on both the left and right sides of the escalator, who can blame him?

Omaha, make your experience yours–don’t make it mine unless I wanna play too.