Tarkblog

My first thoughts of Columbus, some 6 years ago, were mixed.

The city is very pretty, the parks are really nice. I was fresh off my sophomore year in college and ready for my big internship with a tech company.

And then I got my first paycheck, and I noticed something I had never seen before in life. There was a county tax.

I grew up in Vigo county, one of just a small number of counties in Indiana that has no county income tax. Bartholomew County, on the other hand, has a 1% tax. 1% doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up. It was a mild aggravation, to say the least.

And it still is to this day. Not because it’s a significantly noticeable amount of money being drained from my paycheck, but because of some of the things to which I see around here that I know that money is going to buy.

Most notably: the county siren system. Here’s a system with great potential, to warn all of the residents when something bad is going to happen. That’s not how it seems to work though. Here’s my experience with it:

First, the thing goes off every Friday at noon. This is considered a normal routine test. I’m not exactly sure what they’re testing, but I am sure that they confuse the hell out of the people visiting town that day.

Second, the thing goes off in cases of severe weather. A few years ago, I think I only ever heard it go off once (save for the above mentioned times). Then we had a bad storm with some damaging wind, and when it didn’t go off people got very critical of it in the newspaper, so now it goes off for any storm that rolls through that looks red on the radar.

Third, it goes off randomly. Like when it went off the morning of the London terrorist attacks a few weeks ago. Or like when it went off about 10 minutes ago (it’s 10:30pm). Since I live one block from a siren, I get the ear piercing dee-doos shoved my way for a matter of 5-7 minutes before someone pushes the off button. I envision that it’s the mayor sitting at some kind of fancy desk with a big red pushbutton, but it’s probably more like a sanitation worker who pulled the short straw and had to work the night shift.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the concept. But the damn thing never works as it should. They could at least have the courtesy to follow up the dee-doos with an all-clear or something, so I know that Indianapolis didn’t just get hit with a nuke. The best I can do is listen to the radio and wait for them to tell me that somebody goofed. Sometimes the sheriff’s dept. will interrupt all of the cable channels to tell us that nothing is wrong - though I didn’t see that today.

Of course, now as I’m writing this, it’s starting to storm. A quick look at the radar indicates that we’re in for some moderate storms for the next few hours. So maybe the sirens were just Cletus’ way to let all of us people that were sleeping know that it’s going to be raining and lightninging for a couple of hours.

And speaking of storms, does anyone else remember how in the past it used to just rain sometimes? You know, liquid would fall from the sky peacefully, without all of the hubbub of thunder and hailstones and whatnot. Maybe this is one of the signs of the apocalypse, or a facet of global warming. Either way, God, I’d like for it just to be able to rain sometime. Thanks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2005 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.