Remembering to Dot Every “i” — Literally
How a dedicated and detail-oriented public servant spotted — and fixed! —a defective street sign. Plus a new Inconspicuous News Roundup!
Inconspicuous Consumption reader Kurt Rozek lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and works in the neighboring village of Allouez, where he’s a longtime employee of the Allouez Street Department. His duties include driving a dump truck, picking up furniture that people leave at the curb, plowing snow, repairing potholes, and — of particular interest to us today — installing street signs like the ones he’s holding in the photo shown above, which are slated to be positioned at the corner of Park Drive and St. Francis Drive.
Allouez, which has a population of about 14,000, is too small to have its own sign factory, so the village orders its signs from a nearby vendor. Whenever a new batch of signs arrives, Kurt gives them a quick once-over, just to make sure there are no typos or other mistakes. “Sometimes they’ll have ‘Lane’ instead of ‘Street,’ or something like that,” he says. “So I just check to see that everything looks right.”
But when he recently checked the new signs for the intersection of Park and St. Francis, he noticed something odd: On one side of the St. Francis sign, the “i” in “Francis” was missing its dot (or tittle, as it’s sometimes called). Kurt couldn’t recall having seen that particular glitch before, and he figured it was the kind of thing that might be of interest to Inconspicuous Consumption readers, so he took a photo of it:
We’ve all heard the line about dotting every “i” and crossing every “t,” and now fate had provided Kurt with the chance to become a literal embodiment of that maxim. He got himself some reflective tape, cut out a new dot, and applied it to the sign. But he had to engage in a bit of artistic license, because the Street Department didn’t have any white tape on hand, so he substituted silver. Here are two photos that show the factory-applied white dot on one side of the sign and Kurt’s silver dot on the other side: