How I Spent My (Work) Day…
So, myself and coworker Adam were to drive to Allentown, PA today to perform a service call at the US District Court of Eastern PA. It’s a simple job really, but Allentown is normally about an hour and a half to two hours away. However, after taking the ramp onto the PA Turnpike, we were directed to the eastbound lane, and the northeast extension was closed.
Going sound, we saw a fire truck and what was left of a semi that had been burnt to a crisp. I later learned what this news report explains. Watch the report video.
After watching that news report, I later figured out that if we had entered the PA Turnpike just 2-3 minutes later, we would’ve missed ALL of that Route 309 traffic as we would’ve been able to get on the Northeast Extension… and there would’ve been very few cars on it. Arggghhh!!
However, we did see a flatbed pass us with the remains of the truck. It looked like a burnt pile of pickup sticks. And we were staring at it thinking, “How could this truck be in any worse shape?”… and then, BANG! We watched the exhaust pipe of the truck slam into an overpass… it didn’t clear it. It’s just bent it over. So funny.
So, we were advised by our client to take Route 309 all the way to Allentown. This would’ve been fine, except there’s traffic lights every half mile, and that route was backed up, moving at a top speed of 8 mph due to construction is both the north and southbound lanes.
After traveling about 5 miles in a good hour, I used my lovely Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007 with my Globalsat Bluetooth GPS, and guided Adam (who was driving) through 20 miles of back roads to get to Allentown. We finally got to the site, tallying a total drive time of 5 hours to do what should have taken 90 minutes.
I’m currently writing this post in the truck on the way back, and this time we’re fighting rush hour traffic. My laptop battery is going to die and Sprint Mobile Broadband is being flaky, so I’ll clean up this post and make it pretty later.
I hope everyone is having an equally eventful day.. but with much better events.