Yeah, uh, fill those up? Obey the meat puddle / Anonymous
Emergency Funds Would Have Been Earmarked, But They Had No Ears
[AP] Eastsound, WA—A memo released today by The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declines to comment on recent leaks suggesting that Orcas Island High School’s student parking lot has been short-listed for inclusion in its growing list of disaster areas at schools nationwide.
Presently, fifty-seven schools in twenty-three states have suffered such extreme parking lot infrastructure and/or maintenance issues that emergency managers have clandestinely attempted to arrange for airlifts of gravel, sand, asphalt, traffic cones, crossing guards, rubber speed bumps, reflective adhesive fog lines, lane dividers, stop signs, do not enter signs, megaphones, whistles, spike strips, vehicle TASER systems, surface-to-surface missiles, armored personnel carriers (APCs) and spare driver’s education handbooks to schools in those twenty-three states.
“Really, I can’t talk about the leak, which may or may not have been leaked, and may or may not have indicated that several APCs went missing after inspecting a pothole at a school in Georgia, and that half of a middle-school gymnasium was washed away by an improperly installed storm water swale in Nebraska,” a FEMA official said at a news conference Tuesday. “We’re looking for a solution to the problem of leaks, because besides stuff leaking out, it means stuff leaks in.” Pressed for clarification, the spokesperson tried to demonstrate something with some marbles, a glass Ball jar, and a pitcher of water, but instead filled up his right loafer with water and his left loafer with marbles and cut his hand on the broken jar as he reached the point, resulting in being airlifted to a nearby understaffed emergency field hospital.
In Eastsound, local motorists began to become concerned early last year when a storm water swale suddenly threatened to engulf half of the parking lot, causing maintenance staff to encircle it with sinister-looking boulders, which so far have kept the swale at bay, except for the mysterious accumulation of several large pieces of driftwood.
“Look, those king tides we get in the winter could certainly force pieces of driftwood back through the water table and up into drainage areas,” a school district maintenance specialist confirmed. “Haven’t you ever clogged up yer household hopper?”
Fortunately, most of Orcas Island High School’s population has avoided the proliferating potholes, which seem to migrate daily, but which nonetheless test drivers’ reflexes as they try to avoid breaking an axle on their way in, or suffering a concussion on their way out.
“Opportunities for infrastructure enhancement have not been forthcoming,” noted one school district employee under condition of anonymity and fifty bucks. “We’ve got private volunteer funding set up for a new track, an injection-molded Jacuzzi manufacturing factory, a drone assembly plant and pilot-training airstrip, a micro-housing research and development facility, and a full-scale-model ferry immersion tank for emergency aquatic response team training, but asphalt has grown beyond our current affordability.”
Of course, the district parking lot requires more than just a few buckets of tar and some leftover gravel. In order to effect lasting change, it will take the work of many yards of engineering planning computer code and many, many square yards of printed drainage blueprints and many, many, many cubic yards of paving materials and if you don’t get what I just did there, put down this paper and start paying attention to your math teacher, sheesh.
“Look,” said one FEMA official while recovering from scrapes and punctures at a nearby understaffed emergency field hospital, “realistically, letting school parking lots deteriorate is good for the rest of us. Students can’t speed through a parking lot full of axle-busters, or if they do, they only do so once, and it keeps the skateboarders on their toes, and knees, and elbows, and behinds.”
“Still,” noted the unnamed spokesperson, “much is made clear here by discarding everything except the first letter of every paragraph.”