Don’t Move The Cone!

Something a little different today. I saw a cone in the middle of the road which reminded me of a past event and then my brain decided to finish it in a crazy funny way.

Larry knew he shouldn’t move the cone. He’d learnt this when he was very young on a trip to the shopping centre with his family. They had walked around shop after shop until they had closed the shops themselves before leaving, so by the time they had entered the echoing car park, it was deserted. His dad had driven towards the exit but there was a single, solitary, unimportant looking cone on the path leading towards the ramp. Confidently, his dad had declared there was no other way to leave the car park and that someone must have placed the cone there as a joke. So his eldest brother had moved it to the side and they drove onwards, onto the breach of sunlight that invitingly beamed into their eyes. It was as they turned left onto the ramp that they heard the sound of metal on metal, a grating sound but the car continued forwards until his dad saw that the exit was once again blocked. This time though, it was a metal barrier rather than a plastic cone.

Upon looking back at the way they’d come, they saw that the grating sound was caused by another metal barrier which was lowered slightly but not enough to prevent the car from going through. However, reversing back through would certainly damage the dusty grey roof even more and so off Larry’s dad went to search for an attendant to narrate his embarrassing tale to.

Arriving back at the car with a man wearing a high-vis jacket, the barrier was pulled up and they were shown towards another exit which was wide open. Larry had laughed in spite of the situation and the glaring scratches on the car’s roof because a simple drive around the car park would have revealed a far easier way to exit. They had received a warning via the single cone but like heedless horses, they had tried to gallop out of the car park. So Larry told himself that he would not remove any cones in the future without making  sure they were truly pointless.

He was faced with a dilemma. He had come home for lunch today as he wanted to have a warm bowl of noodles instead of the threadbare sandwich on offer at the local Café. He also wasn’t interested in talking to the teenager who worked there about the football match last night in which Larry’s team had lost. He wasn’t in the mood to listen to rubbish about football, especially when it came from that whiny nasal voiced rascal. Now, the thing preventing him from enjoying his noodles was a single orange cone with a reflective band around it that was standing in his usual parking spot. He wondered  if it belonged to Mr Littlewood next door but he couldn’t see his big Jeep which meant he was probably at work.

There was nowhere else to park as his road was the only one with free parking in the area so it was often used by workers during the day. He was surprised no one else had already moved the cone as it appeared so pointless and ridiculous, standing there with its authoritative orange head taking up so much valuable space. He had read somewhere that a parking space in Kensington was worth over £70,000 and whilst the area he lived in was no Kensington, he still thought of that particular stretch of road as his own personal place. So he decided to go ahead and just do it. He would move the cone onto the pavement and no harm would be done.

As Larry pushed open his recently painted white gate of his front garden, eagerly heading towards the kitchen with thoughts of the cone he had moved fast evaporating from his mind, a tipper truck trundled up his road. The driver was an excited young man as today was his first day on the job and he knew exactly what he had to do. Even so, he glanced at his clipboard to read the instructions which told him that the mound of gravel he was carrying should be deposited at the spot where a cone stands.

He could see it now. He thought it was odd that it was on the pavement in front of a white gate but he told himself that orders are orders and that perhaps the customer had not wanted to take up valuable parking space. He positioned his truck so that the bed powered by hydraulic pistons loomed over the parked car which was blocking access to the orange cone. He hummed to himself as he reached for the lever, he could feel that today was going to be a relaxing day but what he unfortunately could not tell was that his truck was unbalanced. The second he pulled that lever, it was going to slam backwards into the poor man’s car, obliterating it and his freshly painted white gate.