Johnstown, home of the never-ending sewer project…

Our town is a mess. Evil yellow monsters are chewing up our roadways neighborhood by neighborhood. Our streets look as if teenaged Godzilla has come to hang out with a few friends. Then Mothra shows up and lays a few dozen eggs.

We’re home to the never ending sewer project. Tow trucks prowl neighborhoods seeking victims. My poor, old clunker can’t take much more of the uneven, somewhat paved roads. I do a quick recon of the area and sneak my car around. Being held together with something called liquid steel, which isn’t working, I can’t chance a tow truck loading my hunk of patched up metal and taking it away before I can convince my hubby that I need a Jeep.

A trip through our town reminds me of an amusement park ride called the wild mouse. You sit in a little car that jars your innards as it jerks you around a track. For a middle aged woman, who drinks a lot of coffee, everyday is a ride of terror. Will she or won’t she pee her pants?

With a shortage of orange cones, the roads now sport rectangular orange and white striped reflector tape barriers. They’re harder to maneuver around. My front bumper has been quite intimate with these pests. Some of the cone replacements have been in neighborhoods for so long, people have been laying claim to them by signing their names on them. Really pissed off people decorate their barriers with swear words.

As a marketing ploy for take out pizza, a pizza company promises to fill potholes on your route home. Plotting out the routes from each of these franchises in our area, I figure I could get at least a quarter of our town paved. Rumor has it though that the pizza company isn’t taking calls from our area code.

Gnarly roads aren’t the worst part of the sewer project. Phase number two is where the shit really hits the fan. We’re required to put in new pipes to connect to the main located under the bumpy roads. Everyone must hire a contractor and pay thousands of dollars to have their yards ripped up, or their driveways, garages, and/or basements jack hammered. The township will fine me every month until the contractor completes the work, but the contractor isn’t answering my calls.

When the work is complete, a township representative will ask for an extortion like payment of seventy-five dollars to blow smoke through my pipes. The smoke ensures that the thousands of dollars you spent on the forced massive destruction and restoration project was done properly.

Instead of a purchasing needed items such as a vehicle, a new mattress, couch, and maybe a hot tub, I’m getting new pipes. The town leaders think I need help spending my money on shit. Is the entire leadership paradigm shooting heroin?

When the contractor finally does show up, he tears through the driveway, garage, and basement, but first we have to move all the crap we keep in the garage and basement. People stop and ask how much I want for the stuff in my yard. Then it rains.

The contractor replaces all the concrete floors. He even puts a nine foot by three foot concrete section in the middle of my asphalt driveway. This section has a two inch lip to it as a pre-jarring before I head out on the road. He’ll fill the driveway hole as soon as he gets enough black top for a large order. Seriously, it takes the contractor an year and a half to finally show up. A large order translates to I’ll probably be fixing that myself. In the meantime, my driveway is asphalt, concrete, and gravel. Why not throw a few bricks in there too?

Despite having to four-wheel out of my driveway, the hubby says we definitely can’t afford a Jeep. He also suggests that I put a pillow on my car seat and drink less coffee. Too bad the pizza company won’t take my calls. They could fill the pothole that begins in my driveway and I won’t have to cook dinner.

Published in Funny Times-November 2018