Normal and Inevitable Change

As I sat down to write this, the thought occurred to me, “After all the sad events of the past few weeks, I sure hope things get back to normal around here,” but then I realized the definition of “normal” has to change. Some things will never be the same again.
In any case, “normal” around any newspaper production facility, is hardly what would be considered normal at any place of business where the order of the day is rationality.
And who wants to be normal anyway?
Well, now and then, I wouldn’t mind “normal” for a while. Just to see what it’s like. Haven’t been there in quite a spell. I doubt that any of the regular inhabitants of the place would even recognize me anymore.
There was a time in my life when I worked with a section of the population for whom “normal” is not only customary but mandatory. I’m talking about civil engineers. If you ever want to see somebody pitch a hissy-fit so severe they almost turn themselves inside out, try telling a civil engineer that his or her carefully designed plan for something relatively simple like a water purification plant, won’t work because it doesn’t fit in with the client’s overall aesthetics. Engineers don’t do aesthetics. They just want to change things for the sake of changing them. That’s why they became engineers in the first place.
Still, these practitioners of the so-called “hard sciences” are no less subject to the vagaries of chance than are those of us inky wretches who ply a trade based on the written word. In evidence of which I offer the following tale.
Some 30 years ago, I was working for the City of Memphis Traffic Engineer’s office. I was given an assignment to help set up a one-way street program in a largely residential area that had been experiencing an unusually high number of children being hit by automobiles. The idea was that there is less chance of kids getting hit if the cars were only coming from one direction. This system had been used successfully in many places and had been proven effective.
Problem was lots of folks didn’t want to live on one-way streets, and the few businesses in the area sure didn’t like the idea. I had to convince these people that the program would work in terms of saving the lives of children and that was more important than the inconvenience of going a block out of their way when they left the house. Through a series of newspaper articles and public meetings I managed to get most of the residents to go along with the plan, but then the whole set-up changed because the owner of one business, a saw mill as I recall, had the political clout with the mayor to keep his street 2-way.
The engineer who did the one way pattern design went into a sulk, didn’t talk to anybody for a week, and did nothing but snarl for a month after that. I could see his point of view. He had been very diligent in making sure the pattern of one-way streets didn’t cause more problems than it fixed.
I, on the other hand, had to go back to all the residents and re-sell the whole things all over again, since keeping the street with the saw mill on it 2-way necessitated changing the direction of almost every other street in the area. It would have lightened my own burden if I could have explained that it wasn’t my idea. The owner of the saw mill was to blame, but I was prohibited from even mentioning this guy’s involvement.
Neither the engineer nor I were the happiest of campers. He wanted to exact revenge by renaming the street where the saw mill was located. He wanted to name it after the mill owner, but without using the guy’s real name. He wanted to use a phrase that he felt described the mill owner perfectly, but the planning commission didn’t want to have to deal with a “Horse’s Rear Avenue.”