can commit collusion.

Here’s the full disclosure:

As much as I love snow, shoveling it is an absolute bitch, especially considering that we have one of the longest driveways in the neighborhood. As if that isn’t bad enough, every time there’s a big snowstorm, residents of Plainsboro are forced to play the what-is-the-snowplow-driver-going-to-do-now game. Oh, and the bad news is, he always wins.

The biggest irony of snowplows is that they help out the greater good by increasing the suffering of each individual. It’s kind of like Communism, except the problem is bad engineering instead of poor ideology. Here’s the issue: every time that stupid snowplow comes around it basically pushes half of the snow on the road right in front of your driveway, undoing whatever hard work you just put in trying to create a path out of your house. But being smart people, we’ve learned to adapt, and instead of shoveling the whole thing, we leave the bit at the foot of our driveway and just wait until they come around before clearing everything out. At the end of the day, it’s probably the same volume of snow, but at least you don’t feel like crap watching your labor being undone.

Granted, this system isn’t ideal, but it works. The problem is, well, when your snowplow drivers in your township decide to collude.

At around 2pm today, after a couple hours of hardcore shoveling and sidewalk path-making (it’s an art!) on my part, our gracious township snowplow driver decides to show up. Never mind that he is about 6 hours late and caused several hundred families to miss work, but he also decides to shovel every street except for the half of Dogwood Dr. that my house is on. Being the lazy efficient person that I am, I decided to just wait it out. A few hours later, the street was still uncleared, and we were all becoming concerned. While I didn’t have to leave the house (do I ever?) any time soon, my mom still had to go to work tomorrow, so we decided to clear the 10 feet of snow (about 12 inches thick) that still remained between the middle of the street and the bottom of our driveway. But my job wasn’t done yet. As things stood, our Nissan Quest was outside and the Volvo inside the garage. My mom has this issue where she has to drive the Volvo to work or else she doesn’t feel safe. Paranoia increases during the winter season. Whatever. So we had to move the cars, which basically meant I had to move the cars. (Sorry, but to the stereotype that Asian women can’t drive is true. After watching my mom reverse into a snow bank repeatedly for a good minute or so, I decided that I needed to take over). The entire ordeal took about 10 minutes, and we were just about to circle back and park the van in the garage and leave the Volvo outside, when the MOTHERTRUCKIN (literally) snowplow comes back, literally shovels only a 50 feet strip of snow on our side of street (thus causing collateral damage and blocking our driveway), and leaves. At this point I was pretty pissed, and not wanting to clear the driveway again, I basically muscled the van back onto the driveway and into the garage. Predictably, my mom was not so lucky and got her car stuck in the snow bank at the bottom of driveway. So we had to shovel the driveway, again, until I finally got the car safely on driveway. Mission accomplished.

So what’s the theory behind the colluding snowplow drivers? Basically the township guy from the afternoon purposely left a little strip of snow on the street for the mothertrucker (contract guy, not township) who showed up later. It was very suspicious for the first guy to leave the strip of snow because he had spent a good 20 minutes clearing the other half of the street before mysteriously disappearing. He leaves the snow for the second guy, who can basically cash in on an hour’s work (I presume he’s paid by the hour) by doing very little work. Easy money for them, while residents suffer. Next winter, I’m buying a shitload of salt.