Employee of the Month, Every Month Since 2019

There's a wasp nest in the second O of DETOUR. Not a big one. A modest, owner-occupied paper starter home, the only affordable housing I've seen go up on that block in seven years, and it went up inside a sign.

The sign stands on a side street off East Cesar Chavez that I'm not going to name, because the sign has been through enough and deserves its privacy. It is orange, or it was. It now leans toward the color of a cantaloupe left in a hot car. It sits on two sandbags and a cinder block somebody added in 2021, either as ballast or as a gesture of support. Across the top, in black vinyl letters that have outlasted three mayoral terms of patience, it says:

ROAD WORK AHEAD — TEMPORARY DETOUR — FOLLOW SIGNS

There are no other signs. There were never other signs. It's been delivering the opening line of a speech for seven years and never once getting to the speech.

So this year, since nobody else at any level of government seems to have filed one, I wrote its annual review.

Position and Tenure

Title: Temporary Detour Sign, Grade 1

Hire date: Sometime in spring 2019, back when a breakfast taco with brisket ran you about four bucks and people still said "pre-Bird" about the scooters.

Reports to: Unclear. I've called 311 about it twice. The first time I was told it belonged to a utility contractor. The second time I was told it belonged to a different utility contractor. On my third try, which I didn't make, I assume I'd be told it belongs to itself, which at this point might hold up in court. Seven years of continuous, open and notorious occupation of a public right-of-way. In Texas, that's practically a homestead.

Status: Temporary.

Core Responsibilities

The sign's job description, as near as I can reconstruct it, is to direct traffic around a construction project. There is no construction project. There is a rectangle of asphalt about the size of a pool table that's been patched a slightly darker shade than the surrounding street, as though somebody dug a hole, looked inside, didn't like what they saw, and closed it back up out of embarrassment.

That patch is the entire construction. The sign has been guarding a scar.

And yet traffic obeys it. This is what gets me. Every morning I watch a delivery van, a landscaping trailer and at least one gentleman in a Tacoma with a kayak strapped to the roof slow down, read the sign, and dutifully swing a block north onto a residential street where there is a stop sign hidden behind a crape myrtle that has never in its life been trimmed. Seven years of Austinites taking a detour around nothing because a piece of plastic asked politely. Name me one other civic instruction in this town that gets that kind of compliance. The water boil notices don't. The lane markings on Lamar certainly don't.

Performance Highlights

Reliability. The sign has been on the job through a pandemic, a winter storm that froze the city solid for most of a week, at least four summers that registered as personal insults, and the opening of more cocktail bars within a half-mile radius than I can count without getting thirsty. It did not stop working during the freeze. It did not shut down when the grid did. It had no pipes to burst. In February 2021, it was the most functional piece of infrastructure on the block.

Adaptability. The street around it has transformed. The tire shop on the corner became a "natural wine and tinned fish concept," then a pilates studio, then a pop-up I genuinely can't categorize, something involving ceramics and a DJ and a $14 cold brew in a glass that says it's compostable. The duplex across the street got scraped and replaced with two skinny boxes painted the gray of a dead phone screen. The sign has stayed itself throughout. In a neighborhood that reinvents itself every eighteen months, the sign is the only thing that has refused a rebrand.

Community engagement. Neighbors have added to it over the years, the way you'd add to a roadside shrine. A sticker for a band that broke up in 2022. A faded flyer for a lost cat named Biscuit (found, according to the handwritten update). A tiny laminated card zip-tied to the leg that reads I'm still here, which nobody will admit to, and which I've decided is the sign speaking for itself.

Customer feedback. Mixed. Here's what I've overheard while standing near it holding a coffee and looking like a man who's either a surveyor or about to be asked to leave:

"Is that still going on?"

"What's the detour to?"

"Babe, I think it's art."

That last one stung, because she might be right.

Areas for Improvement

The sign's main weakness is its word choice, and to be fair, that's on the institution and not the sign.

Temporary is a load-bearing word in this city. It's carrying a lot. The I-35 rebuild downtown is officially temporary, with a timeline where the finish line keeps getting framed as "the 2030s," which is how you describe a decade when you don't want to say a year. Every jersey barrier on Riverside has the bearing of a permanent resident. The "temporary" fencing around half the lots east of the highway has been up so long that the vines on it have been through three life cycles and now count as a mature urban canopy.

At some point a temporary thing that never leaves isn't temporary anymore. It's a policy. It just never had to sit through a public hearing.

So I'd recommend the sign get a new placard. Something more honest. Options I've drafted:

1. DETOUR (ESTABLISHED 2019), the way a barbecue joint puts its founding year on the brisket paper.
2. ROAD WORK AHEAD, EVENTUALLY.
3. FOLLOW SIGNS (SIGN), which at least fixes the grammar.
4. TEMPORARY, with an asterisk and a footnote in four-point type, like every apartment listing advertising "one month free."

Compensation

None. The sign has never asked for a raise. It has not been asked to return to the office, because it never left. It has not been told its role is being "streamlined" or consolidated into an app. In seven years, it has seen rent on the block around it go up by an amount I'd rather not do out loud, and its housing situation hasn't changed one bit: two sandbags, a cinder block, and now a wasp roommate who pays exactly nothing. The sign is the last tenant in East Austin who hasn't been priced out, and that's only because nobody can figure out who to send the bill to.

Manager's Comments

I'll be straight about it. I used to resent this sign. Seven years of the block-north swerve, the crape myrtle ambush, the stop sign that only exists for the people who already know about it. I used to make a point of glaring at it.

But the city that made it has moved the goalposts on everything else. Prices, skyline, which neighborhoods count as "up and coming" and which ones have already come and gone. The bar where I watched a guy play pedal steel for tips got renovated into something with a host stand. The sign made one promise in 2019, this won't last, and it's the only thing out here that's been consistently, gloriously wrong in a direction that costs me nothing.

Overall rating: Exceeds expectations.

Recommendation: Promote to Permanent. Then watch the city remove it inside of a week, because as everybody who's lived here long enough knows, the surest way to lose something in Austin is to finally admit it's supposed to stay.