Design flaw
On the route back from the book store I saw a peculiar sight.
It was a warm Friday afternoon in Fremont. I had just bought an impressive 20lb dictionary and was feeling exhausted while lugging the book back to my appartment. It was difficult to hold the thick behemoth which, if you exaggerate, was essentially a large cube. My other arm was preoccupied with my 64oz, mostly full water bottle, so the opportunity to not be dehydrated was definitely there. At about the 1 mile spot of the 2 mile journey I saw something crazy.
A car crashed into the road. Not the sidewalk curb or a concrete barrier or some road feature that would make sense, but literally into the road itself. The road was a steep pullout to an apartment complex. Unfortunately, it was so steep that the car smashed into the road when attempting to make the turn. The front of the car violently made out with the road giving off a metallically groin which would be good a sound-bite in a Transformers movie. (The whole scene was closer to scrapping than an actual crash, but that’s less dramatic, so I’m pretending it was a crash.) My first thought was, ‘I wonder what Shia Lebuff is up to nowadays?’ My second thought was, ‘That seems like a design flaw.’
Imagine you're a construction worker and go to your boss and say, “Hey boss, remember that road we built recently? The one in Fremont near the bookstore. Yeah, it doesn’t work.”
The boss says, “It’s a road, what do you mean it doesn’t work?”
You (the construction worker) says, “Well… We’ve had multiple reports of people crashing into the road.
The boss says, “We build roads for cars, not people. Why should we care if people are crashing into the road? It sounds like they’re not good at walking.”
You says, “No, it’s the people driving the cars who are crashing into the road.”
The boss says, “Surely you can’t be serious.”
You says, “I am serious and don’t call me Shirley.”
A debate ensues. Strike that, a heated, raw-emotions cage match. The boss’s office is destroyed in the chaos. Both parties break bones. Eventually when the ferocity has died down, when you and the boss can fight no longer, the boss calmly says, “Let’s check the construction report.”
After checking the construction report the story players realize that it was a design flaw. It should have been a 4.5% incline but was built as a 45% incline. Decimal points are important.
