Image by Rafa Fortuño from Pixabay
“I'm going to need whoever these maps on these phones are getting their information from to get their lives together,” Mrs. Maggie Lee said with some exasperation as she found out what had happened to a package she had ordered for her seven little Ludlow cousins. “Harry, would you look at this?”
Col. H.F. Lee looked, scowled, and said, “Now, wait a minute – that's a Pittsylvania County zip code! We're not even next to Pittsylvania – I could see it ending up in Roanoke County, but really?”
Both were sweetly interrupted by their seven-year-old cousin Amanda Ludlow, coming to hug-tackle them and comfort them because “we Ludlows have been through having packages and soda going on express delivery to nowhere, and … uh … I just need to say that y'all are handling it so much better than Papa does, so, good job!”
Whereupon Col. Lee found out, taking Amanda's tales of the Ludlow Bubbly having been driven into the local lake and a few other spots a few times as a first clue, what was really going on.
“Officially,” he said to his wife, “nobody at county even has the job of getting the maps updated. It hasn't been done since 1999, so, the digital maps are just making it up as they go along. Stuff being driven for express delivery to nowhere is a thing in Lofton County, and it's not just roads that have changed. We have low bridges that are taking out tall trucks on a regular basis, so all those goods have to be written off. We have companies whose business we can't get – and thus trade imbalances – because they are not going to risk coming through here!”
“Why are we like this?” Mrs. Lee said as she sat down. “I mean, I knew it was bad, but really, Harry?”
“This county is really loathe to change,” the colonel said as he shook his head, “and it is especially loathe to change on anything that may benefit everyone equally. I found a note from a meeting a few years earlier than that, in which someone said on the record that they weren't interested in doing anything to help 'those NAFTA brown boys' drive business in and out of here. Not since then has the road grid and signage been updated, and that person is still on the county board of supervisors.”
“You are going to pass that note on to his opponent in this election, aren't you, Harry?”
“Maggie, I've sent that and a whole dossier, and I'm about to see what I can do behind the scenes to help more! We just have to sit these people down! Amanda is seven and she should not have to be worried about her grandfather having a heart attack over people driving soda into lakes in the age of digital mapping! We have to sit these people who do not want any progress down before they kill us all!”