Apparently summer is the time for road construction in Oakland, no doubt to make things easier… Apparently summer is the time for road construction in Oakland, no doubt to make things easier for Pitt students, who will largely dominate the streets come fall.

This, however, makes things considerably not easier for summer students at Pitt.

I therefore recount to you this brief story of an unfortunate little girl named Polly Brown as a warning to all those who dare walk the twisty, manholed streets of Oakland in the

summertime:

Polly, a happy, carefree girl, had thought she was a pro at navigating road construction.

After all, she grew up under the jurisdiction of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, or PennDot — proud organizer of the most incoherent construction

procedures ever. And according to Darwinism, we adapt to extreme situations. Kind of like how after eight years under the Bush administration, people have become really, really good at interpreting unintelligible speech.

Unfortunately, Fifth Avenue does not have nearly the same consistency as Bush’s grammar.

Things seemed to start off well for Polly, who began her trek at the intersection of Fifth and Tennyson avenues. Not far along, however, she encountered a smattering of large orange yield signs that had been draped with gray tarps.

Naively, Polly assumed that this meant the construction was finished — ‘Why else conceal such tasteful street decor?’ she reasoned — and continued down the sidewalk, unsuspecting, only to be bombarded no more than 50 feet later by a deluge of fresh orange. Orange cones, plastic orange fencing, orange blinking lights and, of course, large uncovered orange yield signs.

There was so much orange that poor Polly could no longer tell which orange to acknowledge and which orange to ignore.

And amid this sea of fl ashing color rose a great sign, a monument really, like the Washington Capitol of construction, reading, ‘SIDE-WALK CLOSED — USE OTHER

SIDE.’

Well, easier read than done. Like in all great stories, things just can’t be that simple.

‘

What the sign, in all its might andpower, failed to consider was that there was no crosswalk connecting to this distant land of ‘other side.’

This left Polly with two options: double back or follow the stream of people who chose to ignore the orange — god bless them — and continue onward, without fear of potholes or whatever else is indicated by a fl ashing ‘DANGER’ sign.

Oh dear, this does make things difficult for our heroine, doesn’t it?

Polly looked ahead, then behind, then across the street. ‘Gosh! This is the hardest work I’ve had to do all day,’ she lamented before fi nally making her decision.

Perhaps it was the fl ashing lights or her sudden lack of hope that she would leave this venture unscathed, but she continued forward.

As she approached the University bookstore, she began to notice an odd phenomenon. The group of people who had been walking in front of her was missing. ‘Where had they gone?’ she wondered. ‘Did they fall into the manhole? Had the orange consumed them?’

Unfortunately, the answer was worse than both of those two possibilities combined. To the side of the roped-off area, she fi nally spotted the group hastily walking down the bus lane with sad looks of futility on their faces, no doubt knowing that at any moment the 71D could come whizzing by and end it all.

‘Where was the sign to warn me about this, huh? Nowhere!’ she spat, literally onto the street — for Polly was a crude, savage type of girl.

She supposed the construction company must have been too embarrassed to make one. After all, what would it say, ‘SIDEWALK CLOSED — USE BUS LANE’?

With no other options, Polly began to lower herself under the metal barrier separating the sidewalk from the street.

Still, this story might have had a happy ending if Polly wasn’t such a klutzy,uncoordinated girl. She was not very fl exible and ‘had the hamstrings of an 80-year-old woman,’ a physician once told her.

Well, as you can imagine, things did not go well: Polly tripped almost immediately and fell elbow-fi rst onto the cruel, uncaring streets of Oakland.

Oh, Polly, you stupid, little thing.

Panicked, the dizzied girl began frantically looking around the street like the weakest member of a herd of antelope being hunted by lions, wondering, as all those lying wounded in a bus lane must, ‘Can the Port Authority smell blood?’

That might have been the end right there, but our Polly is nothing if not resilient and she’d be damned if she let those construction signs win.

Slowly and painfully, she dug her fingernails into the concrete road and pulled her broken body up Fifth Avenue until fi nally, when all orange was out of sight, she reached the sidewalk, where she was found by a couple of Sodexho trainees the next day.

Dazed and confused on Fifth Avenue? E-mail Molly for help at [email protected].