A very happy Thursday to everybody. A week from now we’ll all be eating turkey if our overlords allow it.

I’m back from a week of travel with the Missus. We visited her mother and my mother and spent more than 28 hours on the road. One of the oddities I saw while driving were isolated “End Road Work” signs. We hadn’t seen any signs telling us we were entering a construction zone, there were no orange cones closing down lanes, no reduced speed signs, no “Speed Photo Enforced” warnings, no equipment, no vehicles, no workers, no dummy police cars, no generator-powered halogen lights—no nothing, except a set of duplicate signs on either side of the road telling us “End Road Work.”

It got me thinking about why they were there. Were they left over from a job that was finished? If so, why would they be left there? Were they left there because it showed where the road work had ended? If so, why didn’t they just pound a stake in the ground with a red bandana on it? Did someone forget to pick them up? If they did, was it because their favorite Seinfeld rerun was on and they thought, “I’ll get to these later”? Does their boss know? Does anyone miss them? Will they eventually be found?

So many questions.

Since it wasn’t obvious why those signs were standing there outside of their normal context, I had to think long and hard about it. It took a while, but I think I finally got it.

Those signs weren’t an announcement; they were a protest! Someone was offended by road work and wants all road work to end. End road work! End all road work! End it now!

The person who put the signs there chose a location that embodied their ideal future—a highway with no road work, unmolested by re-routing, repaving and re-striping. A road that runs straight and true, unmarred by concrete dividers, lane shifts, crawling traffic, orange pylons and “Your Tax Dollars At Work,” “My Mommy Works Here,” and “Hit a Worker $5000 Fine and a Year in Jail,” signs.

By placing “End Road Work” signs along a road that was running fast and smooth, drivers could envision a world without road work, where all roads are made of durable materials, road workers throw flower petals on passing cars, and taxpayers are refunded the unused portion of the state’s highway maintenance budget.

Yep. That’s got to be it.

I could get behind a protest like that.