#1032 Spell Worker

Every once in a while you see something and you say, what were they thinking? Or if they were thinking at all.
So it was not long ago. I was getting on the freeway and I drove by one of those temporary flashing road signs. Used to be you’d get the signs that were pre-printed. They were diamond shaped and yellow or bright orange with black lettering and they had been properly vetted by generations of sign makers.
They had great and arresting messages like “Stop,” “Yield,” and “Congestion Ahead.” That one always had me looking forward to a section of road that caused an allergy attack or something.
Then there were the reforms in gender reference signs. “Men Working” became “People Working” and then eventually just “Workers.” Which was actually more accurate, as often highway workers appeared to be not “working” at all, but standing around looking at a ditch or something.
Anyhow, this sign I saw was the new kind. It had those tiny lights that could be made to spell out whatever you want. Or misspell out as the case may be. Because the sign first flashed, “Pothole Repair Ahead,” and then flashed to a second message, which said, “Prepare to Stop.” Except it said p-r-e-p-a-i-r-. Just like repair but with a “p” on the front.
Hmm. Mathematically, the only kind of pre-pair is a single. Maybe a lonely highway worker was using the programmable signboard as his own personal want ad. Hoping some woman quick enough to figure it out would check out his orange-vested manhood on her way from zero to 60.
More likely, the sign programmer was a college intern suffering from the ravages of spellcheck dependency.
More evidence we are raising a whole generation of people who have never enjoyed the hefty mass of a good dictionary. And worse, have never needed to commit difficult words to memory.
Thanks to the squiggly red-lining fix that automatically singles out word mistakes, spellchecker addicts are totally unprepaired for a computerized device that requires spelling without it.
Caution: Non-Spellers Ahead...
America, ya gotta love it.