Stopped at a red light one day last week, I observed a bus stop, with a bench for passengers, with a local business advertisement on the back of the bench — all quite familiar — and an orange panel van, with a worker in a safety vest extracting a new bus-bench advertisement from a collection in the back.
I’ve seen bus-stop bench ads for my whole life. I had never seen one being changed.
Now of course, if anyone had asked, I might have guessed that there were people who drove around and took off old signs and installed new ones as called for by various contracts. Certainly I would not have imagined that the signs changed themselves, or that professional artists wandered by in the dead of night to paint new ones by hand. But no such question arose, either in life or in my own mind.
Huh. Bus-stop-bench-back-sign-changing is a job. People do that. Hundreds of people do that! Do they do other things as well, or is bus-bench sign maintenance a full-time profession?
As with the designing of panties (see Too Late Wise), this is obvious — as of one second after the thought first hits.
The main difference being: after seeing the bus-stop-bench-back-sign-changing fellow, I was not suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that I had misspent my life.
— Frenulum
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