January 2011
I was driving north of Birmingham yesterday to go and visit one of the great unwashed - yes a customer. I had actually left the safety of my ivory tower office, armed with a little bottle of antibacterial hand gel (well you can’t avoid the minimum social etiquette of having to shake hands can you?) and was venturing out to meet face to face; a real rarity in my job recently.
As I pulled off the motorway onto an A road for the last few miles of my journey, I was struck by a road sign saying “Tamworth 17” i.e. that it was 17 miles to Tamworth. In itself, this was not particularly interesting, but the number 17 itself was on a slightly different coloured background. The number 17 had been changed...
I began to think, what reason would there be for the Highways Agency to have to go out and change the distance indicated from that point to Tamworth?
Had Tamworth moved during the night? Was it now closer? Or, had it inexplicably upped sticks and moved to be closer to Nuneaton? Can you imagine working in Wolverhampton every day (no nor can I) coming home after a long day’s slog only to find that the town you lived in had moved? That’s as disconcerting as coming home from your first term at university to find your parents have changed the locks “for security reasons”.
Hopefully, Tamworth had not moved. More likely that some do-gooder had spotted that on their new GPS SAT NAV they’d had from Halfords for Christmas that Tamworth was actually 17.273 miles from that point and should be rounded down to 17 rather than as previously thought by the Highways Agency that it was 17.63 and which they had rounded it up to 18.
And yes, those people do exist. Whilst looking for a suitable image to accompany this blog post I happened across a website for a group called SABRE which is the Society for All British Road Enthusiasts.
My initial thought was OMG! But then, as I looked at the site, I found myself being drawn in; followed by a sudden chill which meant I had to go and put my anorak on...