I’ve mentioned in passing that the Insta-wife’s health issues have flared up a bit. Last week I took her to a consult at Vanderbilt in Nashville. It was fine, but then we went to Chattanooga to spend the night, and have brunch with an old student who’s now a good friend to both of us. (Knoxville, Nashville, and Chattanooga form a triangle, with the Knoxville/Nashville trip the hypotenuse, more or less.)

Brunch was delightful, but then it was time to go home. The five-mile drive from downtown Chattanooga to Interstate 75 north of the interchange took us about two hours, which is somehat longer than the whole drive back to Knoxville should take. This was not because of traffic, exactly, or an accident. It was because the in-progress construction narrowed four lanes of traffic on I-24 connecting to I-75 into one.

Now, when I say “in-progress construction,” I don’t mean that there was actually any construction in progress. There were signs that there had been, and would be construction. There were machines and piles of gravel and other supplies along the sides of the road. But there weren’t any actual workers doing any actual work that day.

It seems to me that when you’re going to do things that back up traffic that much, you should want to get them over with as fast as possible. But apparently the state highway department and its contractors don’t share that view. It was a Saturday, and having people work then would require them to pay overtime.