My current consulting project site is, as Google reckons, 52 minutes from my home “without traffic.” Now this commute transits the flaming hell that is DC traffic and requires either a long route that may be congested, or a more direct route straight through the heart of the city (contemporary Mordor) which cuts miles off the trip, but which will be congested. I don’t know how Google ever generates data on the time to travel any path within 25 miles of DC “without traffic.” There is never a pause in DC traffic.

Worse, DC traffic comprises two extremes of drivers, each of which introduces unpredictable and potentially fatal variables. There are the frustrated mindless bureaucrats – the lesser cogs in the greater federal machine – whose cars are the only things in their pathetic lives that they feel they can actually affect, much less control, and who imagine themselves to be momentary masters of their own destiny and sole owners of the roadway. They have a certainty that when a car commercial says “do not attempt, professional driver,” they are the truly professional drivers who can try to do that at home. Once released from the regulation-bound, joyless subservience that is their worklife, these minor functionaries release all their frustration and live out all their dreams of greatness upon the streets of the capital area. They will lurch onto the debris-strewn shoulder of the road and accelerate headlong toward a bridge abutment, just for the opportunity to dive into traffic again to gain one car-length “advantage” over another driver. To them, that’s their Charlie Sheen moment – “winning.”

At the other end of the spectrum are the tourists who have no doubt heard how L’Enfant laid out the city in a rational grid pattern, and they naturally assume that it can’t be hard to find their way. While that may have been true a couple of centuries ago, today’s Washington has been corrupted, the original intent subverted. (So it may be fair to say that the roads merely reflect the other DC problems.) In reality, every Tom, Dick, and Grover has had a street named after him, and to accommodate the crowd, street names begin and end frequently and randomly.

In addition to the capricious street names, DC has the poorest signage for any city in the U.S.   And among cities that are also a major tourist destinations, I suspect it’s the most poorly marked in the known world.

Add to this that in rush hour, all of the roadways turn into metal-and-chrome rivers with heavy flows – the commuting equivalent of white water at any narrowing, with swirling, chaotic currents that can sweep away the unwary, never to be seen again.

If Pa Kettle enters the Big City to take the family to see the sights, and is accustomed to any civility, consideration, or cooperation among drivers, he will have missed the “Welcome to Washington, Abandon All Hope” sign at the outskirts. If Mr. Kettle is within a half-mile of an exit that he does not want to take, but finds himself in an “exit only” lane, be assured that he will be taking the exit. The current is simply too strong, too unyielding.

You can identify this type of driver – wayyyy out-of-state plates, with a wife/mother struggling with an unfolded map, the huge eyes of frightened children peering from the backseat window, and the surest indication of all: a sad tribute to faith in the noblest aspects of mankind – a turn signal flashing in the direction that Pa wants to go.

Will the cars part, like a mechanized Red Sea, to let him in? Hahahaha! Pa will find that the mirthless bureaucrats find mercy a sign of weakness. They will delight in knowing that they can exercise their power to bend him to their will and force him off at the exit, to go miles out of his way in an unfamiliar city.

Yield one car-length of progress to this pathetic loser?  Risk arriving at their numbing, unrewarding, soul-sucking workplace all because of taking pity on a stranger? I repeat, hahahaha.

Oh, and those visitors who put their faith in their GPS units soon find them a false god – a god who doesn’t know where the guerrilla road crews are going to have blocked off huge sections of roadway (apparently only to make potholes into speedbumps). Nor can their god keep track of all of the one-way restrictions that appear prior to rush “hour.”

If you are new to the area and find you’re on the wrong road in rush hour, I suggest you simply pull into the first parking garage you see and have a tailgate party until it’s over. Alternatively, you can succumb to the siren call of free on-street parking which will lead you to ever-wider circles in a futile search. The last available free parking space within 10 miles of DC became a bicycle-parking-only space to accommodate the Yuppie lobbyists who can afford to live in town and pride themselves on never having owned a motor vehicle. On the bright side, after you realize that you have lost 3 hours of your life on an urban snipe hunt in search of either the correct route or a parking space, rush hour will be subsiding a little and you may find a way to your intended destination.

These kamikaze bureaucrats and the wandering rubes combine to transform even the simplest commute into an extended test of driver competence, driver focus, and driver reflexes for all the other drivers who must anticipate and respond to the perverse whims of these traveling road-hazards.

At first, I thought that if I had an hour-and-a-half commute each way, I could at least put it to good use.  I tried listening to insightful podcasts and language lessons during the long periods spent covering the same familiar routes day after day. However, I found that the mix of bureau-kazes and displaced tractor drivers does not permit such attempts at personal growth.  I usually found that when I arrived at work, I had been so mentally consumed with avoiding the biohazardous drivers that I could not remember any podcast insights or any new vocabulary in any language except Expletive.

And so it was that at the time of Steve Jobs’s death, I listened to a podcast of his wonderful 2005 graduation address to Stanford graduates, and one of his suggestions resonated with me: “[F]or the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been, ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” I made that into a decal that I put on my bathroom mirror, where I saw it every morning.

I was in a soulless project at the time, where being a government contractor was not unlike being in an abusive family – you knew you were going to be beaten each day, but you didn’t know for what. Every frustration in the personal or professional lives of every government employee in the agency would be vented with impunity on the only humans that employees could denigrate with impunity: the contractors. Contractors cannot fire “civil servants” (what a misnomer!), and not being employees, contractors have no standing to complain to HR.  They are the only truly safe targets.

Well, I started one too many days answering “no” to Steve’s question first thing in the morning. Shortly after that, I resigned. I had no other job lined up. I had no idea what was next. But I was sure that I was not doing that anymore.

It worked out fine. I found a new job immediately that actually permitted learning new things and being recognized as being a contributing part of a team. That project came to a natural end, and I’m now working on a much different project for even more money, with a much different relationship with the government employees – we really are a collaborative team. And yet, the commute has begun tipping more and more days into the “no” category for my morning quiz. So once again, I find that I’m planning my “exit strategy,” and once again, I have the serenity that comes from knowing that I’m making the right decision… for me.

I’ll miss some of the client staff and many of my contractor teammates, but I will not miss the commute. And a door opens to a new world of possibilities where there are fewer bureau-kazis and corn-fed tractor-jockeys conspiring to test my reflexes every day. Where driving can be a journey, not a competition.

So far, I haven’t decided exactly what’s next.  A new job with a short commute?  Maybe even a walkable distance?  Raising alpacas in Belize?

Maybe.  One door closes….

There and Back Again by Ed Ward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.