“Road construction!” Big John said as he burst into the diner and slapped his ball cap down on the table with a flurry of disgust; much like a tent revival preacher stirs the fervor in his congregation on a hot August night. “Tried to get here twice, but the detour didn’t go this way. I had to go home and start all over. I blame the engineers.”

“Just remember, 50 percent of all engineers graduated in the bottom half of their class,” Harry Winkle mumbled between mouthfuls of biscuits and gravy.

If you do the math, you’ll discover that Harry is correct on this one. With the gathering of wit and wisdom at the breakfast round table, in the middle of the diner, knowing who to blame is far more important than coming up with anything that resembles a solution.

Jimmy took his napkin and wiped grape jelly from the ends of his moustache.

“Where’s the detour?” Now that he knew the occupants of the simulated oaken circle were blaming engineers, he felt the need to know what the engineers had done to deserve such impugning.

“They’re building one of them danged round-about-traffic-confusion gizmos at the Brick Road intersection. Some engineer figured it would reduce congestion. They took a perfectly good, square corner and dug it all up to make a circle. Now, I can’t get here from there. I got turned around twice and they haven’t even built the danged thing yet.

“They have those things all over Boston,” Jimmy said as he jumped back into the conversation with a tidbit of trivia that only he would care to know. “They call ‘em rotaries out there. I got on one and went around and around until I got lost. I had to use my GPS to figure out how to get back off, again.”

Mort chimed in with information gleamed from his favorite misinformation source.

“I read on the internet that the roads in Boston were designed by turning the cows loose and following them with asphalt paving machines. That’s how engineers did things back then.”

“Got all that from the internet, did ya?” snickered Harry as he raised and pointed his coffee cup in the general direction of their long suffering server, Sarah. He then turned his attention away from Mort’s internet inauthenticity in order to focus on Jimmy’s previous statement. “When did you get a GPS?”

“I’ve had it for a while, but can’t stand using it. Why would I want some bossy woman yapping in my ear, telling me when and where to turn? It’s just wrong.” Jimmy has never been married and has never been very good at listening to a woman (or anyone else, for that matter), telling him how to do things.

“Why I thought I should pay good money on an overbearing nuisance, bossing me around in my own car is beyond me. I paid for my very own back seat driver. I’d like to get my hands on the engineer who dreamed up that stupid idea.”

Harry took a quick sip of his fresh cup of coffee, and asked, “Then why did you buy it?”

“It was on sale — too good of a deal to pass up.”

“I’m hearing the perfect example of the ‘bottom half of the class’ scenario.”

Larry Wilson is a mostly lifelong resident of Niles. His optimistic “glass full to overflowing” view of life shapes his writing. His essays stem from experiences, compilations and recollections from friends and family. Wilson touts himself as “a dubiously licensed teller of tall tales, sworn to uphold the precept of ‘It’s my story; that’s the way I’m telling it.’” He can be reached at wflw@hotmail.com.