I’m laughing here, but I have found another completely useless thing in my life, road condition/emergency preparadness groups on social media. This was something that was encouraged several years back by paid public officials who knew they served absolutely no useful purpose themselves when it comes to public safety and preparadness.
We’re not going to sand, de-ice, plow, fix potholes, announce road conditions, or serve the public in anyway, but here’s this app, “NextDoor,” that you should all join so you can share emergency information with one another. I made it almost a whole five weeks. That was a major feat of self control, let me tell you. It’s really bad when you know exactly where someone lives and they be all acting like a fool and up in your business like that keyboard gives them some weird superpowers. Apparently several karens had no idea who I was. Let me tell ya, they were fixing to find out when I just went marching over there to have a word.
Stoopid ought to be illegal….
Thankfully I have the Holy Spirit who flat out said, Ima need you to delete NextDoor. Too much of a temptation. You can’t be using the same mouth for blessing and cursing. Yes, it was that bad. I concluded that in the event of an emergency or even just in the event of a pleasant day, my first line of business was going to be to stay as far away from those nutcases as possible.
So I moved over to some other local road condition/emergency groups. Completely useless! The blind leading the blind. At least they aren’t mean-spirited and mouthy, but their anxiety level is so over the top and through the roof, it is a bit jarring. It’s like just one panicked post after another like, “OMG am I going to make it?!” I don’t know? Where are you? What is this even regarding?
There will be dozens of individual posts demanding to know road conditions at such and such and an intersection with no response from anyone at all. I don’t know what to tell you, looks like everybody who tried to go through that intersection today were just never heard from again?
I get a bit confused by those who constantly ask, “So can I make it down this road and onto the highway? This is like outsourcing one’s own critical thinking skills and demanding a prophetic word or a psychic prediction. Also, “making it” is somewhat subjectively defined. I mean, there are lots of variables! Will you survive the experience? Probably. Will your car? Questionable. Will you make it without throwing up, wetting your pants, and needing a tow? That’s about a 50-50 chance right now. Try to keep in mind that those who did not win that coin toss are currently hogging all the tow trucks.
What do locals and old timers do? We don’t drive! We just wait it out. Yeah, I know, there’s only about a half inch out there. The thing is, it’s sitting on top of the black ice from yesterday. That’s not even the biggest challenge. The biggest problem is some NextDoor karen texting on her cell phone while she gently slides down the hill right at you.
If you want to drive in the snow in winter, you’re going to need to move somewhere like Minnesota or Alaska. Heck, it’s often not even safe to drive around here in the summer!
See, there's this thing called biology... 
When I was in school, we used to call people like you described Power-Junkies. Now this kind of behavior is so normalized that scarcely anybody notices. Cancel Culture, the Scamdemic, and the last two ‘elections’ have convinced me that Americans just aren’t happy unless they’re throwing their weight around and lording it over somebody else.
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That’s why half of our country voted for the return of the Orange Man. Lord help us all.
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Nightwind, “power junkies” is a good word for it. People who haven’t had a lot of power, meaning unfamiliar with the nature of authority and accountability, tend to be bullies. They think being in charge is all about getting to be the boss and tell people what to do. Or worse yet, being the one who gets to report all the non compliants to the authorities for extra credit points.
Doug, not sure how many power junkies voted for President Trump, but I trust him and continue to be delighted with what he is doing. This is what I voted for and he has been delivering admirably.
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Yes, IB, I know you are delighted. Your blog, your party. I will try and restrain myself from imposing on your “delightedness”.
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Why do such snowflakes run the country, the ones w/ 2 legs? Call the National Guard, may get 1/2 inch snow! Geez.
Ant the neighbor network? Yeah, what could go wrong. Full time job that being a busybody.
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What a waste of your time. Don’t you have a system like 511 here in NV?
https://www.nvroads.com/
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LOL! Sort of! This state also has a Dept of Transportation. Not the most helpful thing, either.
This is done as a bit of a joke and all in good fun, so I don’t wish to chide them too harshly, but our DOT is fond of just drawing us crayon sketches of what is going on. I kid you not! It does give you some idea as to the nature of the problem, however.
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/transportation/article/WSDOT-traffic-transit-map-MS-Paint-Twitter-events-14059795.php
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I thought you were joking about the crayon sketches.
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Okay, you gave me quite the chuckle!
I’m on a local highways conditions group, and for the most part, I find it extremely useful. Yes, we get some people doing things like complaining about drivers going “too slow” (meaning, the speed limit) and mocking people for slowing down when the roads are icy and visibility is low. Mostly, though, it’s things like “I just drove from A to B, using highway X, and conditions are good.” Or “I started to go from A to B, but the conditions are so bad, I turned around and went home. Stay home, if you can!” I’ve contributed myself, every now and then, when it seemed relevant. Like reporting that a section of highway was shut down due to a major accident, not long ago.
But then, I live in the boonies. It’s typically a minimum 20 minutes of highway driving between towns, surrounded by farmer’s fields and the odd house near the road. When I first joined the local group, it was for 3 highways. Since then, it’s expanded to cover 4 highways and several provincial trunk roads. There have been times where I’ve made a trip to a nearer small city (still almost an hour’s drive away) and posted about each section of highway and provincial road I took on my route, because the conditions on each of them was wildly different!
I suspect our different geography, climate and lack of population makes things very different from your experiences!
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Glad I made you laugh! I live in the boonies too, although not nearly as remote as you. It’s also much, much colder where you are. What makes it hard here is that the weather is really unpredictable. We can have no snow but a few miles down the road they get several inches. Or you can have bare and wet roads, go into a store or have lunch, and come out to a winter wonderland. We can do all four seasons in one day or just plunge into a week long freeze.
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Oh, my, yes. Before moving out here, we were sometimes affected by the chinook winds. Not as much as around Calgary, but enough that we could get snow, or have it all melt away – any time of the year!
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Neurotic nanny-state nimbies…
You were better off deleting that silly app.
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