Modesto road crew has a ‘colse’ call with street sign error. We can forgive this one
My first reaction to a Modesto construction-zone street sign reading “Right shoulder colsed 400 feet” was to laugh.
The dependable source who emailed me a photo of the misspelled sign, at the northwest corner of Kansas and Dakota avenues, might prefer that a newspaper columnist wax indignant and judgmental. This, after all, is our tax money at work, in a road project opposed by several hundred people — the future Highway 132 expressway.
“And we think these people can handle building a freeway with bridges????” she said in the email.
I know. It’s easy to make fun of government agencies when they goof up. I do it, in a very public way, on a semi-regular basis.
I also do it on a frequent basis in a private way. Whenever I or my adult daughters run across something printed for public consumption that’s marred by bad spelling or tortured syntax, we snap a picture, send it to the others and share a good laugh.
One daughter recently took a law school test in a room with a sign reading: “Exams in progress. Quite please.” Her accompanying caption: “This is supposed to be an august institution.”
That faux pas seems less egregious because transposing the last two letters of the word in question, quiet, gives us another perfectly fine English word. Some may breeze by it and not even notice the error.
It’s much harder to forgive colsed because that’s not an actual word. Someone involved in the process of printing the sign, transporting it or installing it should have caught and corrected it, saving City Hall embarrassment, right?
Curiosity about such mix-ups extends to my work telephone number: 209-578-2390. About every other week — sometimes more, sometimes less — someone calls asking for California Rehabilitation, whose last four digits are 3290.
Does this — receiving dozens of misdialed calls year after year, because dozens of different people for some reason transpose the seventh and eighth numbers in a 10-number sequence — happen to anyone else?
I asked the father of my daughter-in-law — he’s a brain surgeon — about this phenomenon. He said something about messages getting crossed between hemispheres of our brains. He mentioned dyscalculia, described as dyslexia with numbers instead of letters or words. He also said he often calls one of his children by another child’s name.
Don’t we all? If you haven’t found a typo in The Modesto Bee, you haven’t tried very hard.
So transposing numbers or letters doesn’t have to be the result of a learning disorder. Sometimes we just make mistakes.
Modesto and its partner in the Highway 132 project, Caltrans — august institutions, indeed — are not at fault for the sign boo-boo. In this case, a sign maker produced it as ordered by a contractor, whose “construction management inspectors” were “perhaps too close to the work” to notice the error, city spokesman Thomas Reeves said.
It was replaced with a correctly spelled sign a few hours after I inquired — at the contractor’s expense.
Is that explanation good enough for taxpayers?
Let’s have a laugh, then give them the benefit of the doubt. No one wants to be accused of having a colsed mind.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
