Setting Things Straight, Literally
Jared Ewy’s obsession with fixing misaligned manhole covers makes him the perfect inconspicuous folk hero for our times.
Note: This article includes several short videos that are essential to the story, so I strongly recommend that you read the web version, not the emailed version. Enjoy! — Paul
Many of us have some sort of existential pet peeve — something that’s superficially insignificant yet also epitomizes how the universe itself is in an irredeemable state of dysfunction. The thing that triggers you might be forks whose tines don’t quite align, or backwards apostrophes, or cars that still have their turn signal on after changing lanes. For other people, this type of thing is just a minor glitch in the matrix. But to you, it’s an affront.
For Jared Ewy, a 51-year-old marketer and comedian who lives in Littleton, Colorado, that affront was the manhole cover shown above. He saw it every day for years while walking his dogs, and the misaligned stripes drove him bonkers. If a work crew had needed to go down the manhole, why hadn’t they replaced the cover in the proper orientation? Was that really so hard? The unseemly spectacle of the off-kilter stripes lodged in his brain like a splinter, a nagging symptom of cosmic cultural rot.
So on December 25th, 2023, Ewy decided that his Christmas gift to humanity would be to fix the manhole cover. It might not quite be on the same level as, say, curing cancer, but it was his way of helping to make the world a better place. He documented the process in this video:
That video went viral on TikTok, and Ewy realized he had found his calling. In the nearly two years since then, he says he’s reoriented somewhere between 20 and 30 additional manhole covers, slowing bringing the world back into alignment. He now has better tools than the ones he used in that first video, along with an orange safety vest that has become part of his uniform for this project. He’s continued to document his work, and sometimes the videos even tell a sequential story, as in the case of these three clips:
I suspect that I speak for many of you — and, I’m hoping, for all of you — when I say that I find Ewy’s devotion to this project to be nothing short of heroic. I wanted to learn more, so I got in touch with him and arranged an interview. Here’s a transcript, edited for length and clarity: