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The American Shoulder

Among the plethora of things in our everyday life there are many unsung heroes.  One of them is the 'shoulder'.  Not necessarily the one some may need to cry on, as a part of the human anatomy but the one on the side of the road.  No I don't mean that of a homeless person either.  I mean the literal side of the road (on the left or right).

You see America is the land of plenty and therefore has plenty of land.  Duh!  What that did is that it allowed for the road engineers to think of a situation where an automobile on said roadway would need to park itself, while still traversing this road, in the event that the 'mobile' portion of its ability was rendered not so.  Ergo the 'shoulder'.

This is a piece of pavement designed specifically on either side of roadway to allow a vehicle to pull over and out of the way of other mobile machinery that otherwise would have to suffer the same fate - that of being stranded.  But this shoulder idea is awesome.

Most incidents of shoulder parking arise out of the owner of said mobile having run out of dinosaur juice aka petrol.  It happens apparently to the best of us.  So much so that some on the American highway are incapable of reacting to this situation and forget there is a shoulder specifically designed to pull over.  They just sit in the lane of traffic adding to the fodder of traffic updates on the radio, every 10 minutes.  Often described in poetic terms as the 'stall on 101 in lane 2' is adding to delays heading to San Francisco or some such.  It is dramatized by a guy taking in the view of the backup from his helicopter some 1,000 feet above.  Joan, I can see this backup myself now stretching 2 miles to the Yorba Linda overpass, where apparently someone in a pickup truck threw their old Serta mattress out the window, which seems to have struck an innocent bystander on the street below the overpass.  Boy what a nightmare!

Other scenes include the death of a battery or some other critical component responsible for successful internal combustion of above mentioned juice.  Sometimes it is the collision of two or more vehicles whose drivers somehow could not figure out the complex arithmetic and vectors of 3-D objects and are in denial, once hauling at 90 miles an  hour so easily rendered to scrap.

What happened?  Guy forgot to pull over.  Oh he didn't make it to the shoulder.  So the rest of us have to shoulder his burden - sit in this god awful traffic for who knows how long?

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