Infucktions to enter an office park

You know how, when you’ve reached the end of some laborious task and you suddenly realise you’ve made some stuff up, and being so loathe to start the task afresh, you find a way to patch it up, Band-Aid style?

In reality of course, the Band-Aid sticks out like the sore thumb itself and is all anyone else ever really notices, so you know you should’ve saved yourself the scorn and put in the effort by redoing the whole thing, 100% properly the second time round.

Well, I have this feeling frequently, so it fills me with immense glee to be able to point out someone else’s Band-Aid for a change, and hopefully you’ll agree this problem would truly have been better fixed (in fact truly only have been fixed) by starting the task over from scratch.

Refer to the picture beneath: this is the entrance to our new office park, a building in which the developer has made a number of priceless errors (hopefully not highly pricey errors as we have bought a sectional title from them and hence would be forking out the cash to fix any of their building blunders). No blunder quite outdoes this entrance, however.





You see, folks, in South Africa, we drive on the left hand side of the road. Which means that when one enters an office park – no different than the one pictured above – one expects, quite rightly (or is that leftly?), to enter the park by remaining in the left-hand lane of the road (which is especially important if a vehicle were to be exiting the park from their left-hand lane, i.e. your right-hand lane). This is unfortunately not the case in practice, as you have to veer to the right lane in both of the possible scenarios: a) if you are a visitor and need to get the guard’s attention, you need to maneuvre yourself into the right-hand lane to speak to him, and he inevitably opens the right-hand boom post to let you in as it involves the least effort on his part; and b) if you have an access card and need to swipe it to enter without the boom guard’s assistance, you must do as in a) because they installed the fucking swipey machine thingy on the right hand side of the entrance.

If one must give the twits credit, then it is for at least being consistently stupid – for the swipey machine thingy is also in the right-hand lane as you exit the complex. It is thus not inconceivable that two cars (one entering and one exiting the complex simultaneously) might be able to avoid getting in each other’s way, because both would be on their respective wrong sides of the road.

But the silliness could not stop there. Some tenants/owners in the park must have complained about the required violation of driving codes, because the developer attempted to “fix” it – not in the ideal start-from-scratch-and-rip-out-the-swipey-thingies-and-reinstall-them-on-the-correct-side-of-the-road manner, but rather in the ill-advised short-cut Band-Aid manner.

The painted signals on the road is the “solution” to their error.

I hereby formally offer a Chocolate Log to anyone who can intelligibly explain how this solution works – Third Roommate and I pondered it extensively yesterday afternoon, and it delights me to see the nervous and bewildered reaction of anyone approaching the signs for the first time.

In my mind, the marks are intended to cause a bumper cars road-rage incident, where two approaching cars are both expected to yield for the other car (approaching in the same lane), daring the other car to make the first move and switch to the other lane, at which point the other car retaliates by doing the same thing, then bang! [Beemer and Merc bumpers merge] and kaboom! [ego’s entangle] and pow! thwack! kkkruuunch! [a Sandton trendy capoeira-style punch-up ensues]

Ideas, anyone?