highwaysign

highwaysign
Originally uploaded by Ravenmn.

Oops!

My mother, a retired geographer and cartographer, would love this story. I heard about it on NPR's "Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me!" show and then googled for more information. By the way, the radio show is almost always fun listening. I like to pull it onto my desktop at work and listen on my headphones. I usually wait until a particularly nasty day. Listening to the show tends to pick me up and put my lousy day in perspective. I highly recommend it.

Here's the story found via Google:

Alabama road signs in Massachusetts?

EASTHAMPTON, Mass.(AP)_ The highway signs at the intersection of Routes 10 and 141 might make you think you'd taken a wrong turn and wound up in the Deep South.

Amid the staid Yankee surroundings of this western Massachusetts town, the recently installed signs bear the outline of the state of Alabama, squashed to fit the square shape.

The incorrect signs had been up about a week when Joe Pipczynski, Easthampton's superintendent of public works, was alerted by a state Highway Department worker.

Pipczynski spoke to city officials and consulting engineers and came up with a theory. He believes the contractor opened the federal manual governing the appearance of highway signs.

The example there shows a sign for Route 21 in Alabama, including an outline of the state surrounding the numbers. In Massachusetts, the signs are supposed to be simple black numbers on a white background.

Pipczynski thinks the contractor's staffers sent the example to the sign maker and got exactly what they asked for. But the contractor, A. Pereira Construction Co. of Ludlow, doesn't know what happened.

"We didn't really question it, because the numbers were correct," company spokesman Roger Remy said. Mike Superson is co-owner of a Big E's Supermarket, which is right next to the signs.

"I looked at them 100 times since they put them up," he told The Boston Globe.

"This is the first I've heard of this." The signs will be replaced as soon as possible, Remy said.