IN PRINT: Unsung Heroes of the Pothole War

Here at Princeton, we all love to play something I call the Sleep Deprivation Game. You know what I'm talking about. The one where you nonchalantly throw statistics about just how tired you are and just how little you slept last night into conversation. The one where you one-up your friends by saying that you pulled more all-nighters than them last week. The one that leads to exchanges like:A: Hey what's up? B: I'm so tired dude. I slept 3.5 hours last night. A: Ohhh my God that's crazy ... I totally know how it feels though because I've gone like three days on 2 hours of sleep each. B: Oh yeah that's intense. But last week I pulled two all-nighters in a row, AND I had 9 a.m. lab the next morning. A: Aw I'm so sorry, but you know during discussions I just didn't sleep at all, for like four days straight! (At this point, B stops talking. A is gloating and thinking, "YES I WIN I'm so exhausted and hardcore haaaa.")It is twisted and masochistic. But you know you play this game all the time. With that in mind, consider this statement:"So I get up at 3 a.m. to work. Usually I keep going until around 7 in the morning ... then I take a quick nap and get back to business at 9. As for sleep, I get a few hours here and there. It's enough to keep me going."Sound familiar? Surprisingly, this quote doesn't come from a Dean's Date victim. It comes from a little-noticed minority group, whose constituents are even more sleep-deprived than you: the local public works crews.We all complained this morning when we woke up to a fresh carpeting of snow. But for us, that just meant putting on an extra layer, pulling out our boots again and bracing ourselves for a windy walk to the nearest coffee source. For the men of Central Jersey's road maintenance teams, it means leaving their beds at 3 a.m., going into the subzero darkness and grueling for hours and nights and days over snowplowing, road-salting and pothole repair.They've been waging war on the cold since the first storm after Christmas and won't be stopping anytime soon. Even when spring does arrive, all the thawing and melting will just bring an epidemic of potholes, most of which have already been repaired, but re-open with every freezing and thawing cycle.So before you engage in the next round of FMLIHarderThanYours, remember the guys who were out before sunrise this morning, cleaning the roads and sidewalks so you could get to your philosophy precept. They are warriors of grit and asphalt, fighting icy battles with courage, resolve, and 1,900 tons of salt. They rise early. They sleep little. They spend hours facing pothole after pothole - the same ones they filled last week - and they don't complain.Suddenly, finishing the next paragraph of your paper doesn't seem quite as drudging, does it?Details of the pothole war at the Princeton Packet.