If you're gonna close the roads, then fucking work on them.

I drive a lot. I live near Philly, work near Atlantic City, and play hockey twice a week near New York. On the way to hockey games, I usually stop and pick up my pal who lives in Monmouth County because he can't drive. It's pretty safe to say that I'm all over the state of New Jersey every week. I've seen a lot of roads.

I've also sat in lots of traffic. During rush hour I don't get mad at it, because I fully expect it. Lots of people want to get home from work. I get that. But nothing is worse than sitting in an hour of traffic at midnight when it should be nothing but you and the open road all the way to your destination.

When this happens, it's usually because roads or lanes are closed off for construction. And that makes my blood boil.

After sitting in traffic for hours I used to speed past the workers without looking over. I was convinced that the cause of all the traffic was that rubber-necks in the front of the line had to stop and look at what was going on, so I did my part by cruising to the open part of the road.

But now I stop and stare.
I wasn't ready for what I saw.

Out of the 25 guys on-hand to "work", there were maybe two guys performing actual labor. The rest of the guys were split up into groups along the road. Smoking cigarettes. Eating hoagies. Waiting in lines to use the porta-potty. Telling jokes and laughing. I even saw one guy on the AC Expressway laying face-up in fresh asphalt like he was trying to make a permanent snow angel.

I wanted to drive my car across the median and take some construction vehicles out with me.

There's 500 cars backed up at midnight on a weekday, and these lazy fucks are sitting around playing with their dicks when they're supposed to be fixing the "problem" that they themselves are causing.

I understand that you work shitty hours and your job includes physical labor, and everyone gets to take a break at work. But not all 25 of you at the same time. This is what you signed up for so fucking do it. The NJ Turnpike doesn't need to be backed up for six months straight so you guys can have somewhere to go at night to escape your home life. Get the job done and move on to the next one.

Or else just quit and go get a different job. Maybe find one where you have to drive home through two hours of unnecessary traffic, then get to watch guys hanging out and laughing when you get to the end of the line.

Round of Applause

I bet when you were younger you wanted to be a Police Officer when you grew up. Or maybe a professional athlete, or a princess, or a firefighter or something totally awesome like that.

Not me.

There was one specific thing I always wanted to become. Something that I thought would be so much better than anything else.

I wanted to be that person on a sitcom that the crowd cheers for whenever they walk in the room.

I'm not saying I wanted to have the character traits of Steve Urkel. I mean, it would be cool to be a genius, but he was still a little too nerdy for my liking. But the one thing that made him stand out from the other characters on Family Matters, in my memory at least, is that when he would walk in the room, the crowd would go wild. They would cheer as he stood in the doorway, shaking his hips back and forth in his tight jeans and suspenders, licking his lips while surveying the family room. He had to wait a full three seconds before he could deliver his lines because the crowd was too busy cheering in anticipation. While Carl, a police officer by the way, was cool in his own right, he never got quite the same crowd reception as Steve.

Again, I want to stress that I didn't want to be Steve Urkel. I wanted to be what he was. What he represented. There were other characters on other shows who embodied the same things in different ways. Al Bundy on Married... With Children. Kramer on Seinfeld, Screech on Saved by the Bell, Shawn Hunter on Boy Meets World, and Cody on Step by Step. They embraced what they did, and the people loved them for it. I wanted to be a combination of all of them when I grew up.

Getting applauded is fun. If it hasn't happened to you in your lifetime, then I suggest you find a way to make it happen at some point. I've made big plays playing sports in front of large crowds, I've performed on-stage in high school, and I've walked into parties with large quantities of alcohol and girls. Each one of these can earn cheers from an audience. Just imagine having that day in and day out.

Just like everything with getting older, the fun that comes with youth and being naive fades away. I've since realized that most people don't just stop and cheer for you when you walk into a room unannounced. I'm not even sure if the cheers on the shows were an actual audience or just a recording that the director would play.

We're grown-ups now, and some of us are becoming what we wanted to be when we were kids. Some of us are starting out with jobs that we thought we'd have while going through college. And some of us are working hard to make a buck, grinding through long days and tough hours, in a career that never crossed the mind until it was a necessity. No matter which scenario you fall into, there's one thing all of them can agree on: Working sucks.

And yeah we've all got great friends. Families. Girlfriends, Boyfriends. Dogs. But which one of them is cheering for you when you walk in the door after a hard days work? Not one of them.When you walk in that door you deserve something that picks your spirits up and makes you happy just because you are who you are.


And that's why I'd rather hang out with Urkel than any one of those jerks.