Orange You Glad?

There was a time when I spent a lot of time fussing about how much those folks with the orange vests get paid to stand there on the street and flip a sign from "slow" to "stop." It bothered me that what appeared to me as the simplest form of manual labor could be elevated to a salary that puts them in a bracket beyond what I was making at the time. I was installing modular steel furniture, making the world safe from collapsing typing returns. Many was the time when, on my way to deliver and install some of that modular steel furniture, our crew was waylaid by one of those folks with the orange vest and the sign on a pole. They seemed to watch us so callously, as if they were waiting to maximize the delay they could enforce with their absurd level of power.
So there I sat, fuming.
Just the other day as I rode my bike to school, I encountered a group of orange vests, some of whom were milling about, another who was making the most awkward possible eight point turn in the middle of a block, and one whose job was to direct traffic while nothing else was allowed to happen. This gentleman looked up and saw my two-wheeled approach and gruffly waved me past. "C'mon, c'mon," he grumbled as I rode past. I felt a twinge on that tired old nerve that made me want to stop and fuss with this fellow, but then I remembered where I was headed.
I was going to school, where a great many hours out of the scores I spend there are spent wearing an orange vest. A good portion of my day is spent directing short people to various destinations, monitoring pedestrian matriculation, and shooing stragglers. While I wear an orange vest. And I often use orange cones of various sizes to impede or restrict movement across the playground. I do not wield a sign with "slow" and "stop" on it, but I do have a whistle.
And I'm getting paid.
Not like Caltrans getting paid, but I'm getting paid.
So I've got this great gig with an orange vest and cones where I get to boss people around, albeit mostly shorter than me and vehicles aren't involved. Which is nice. As authority goes, it helps me understand the power that surges through those carrot colored vests. Sometimes I say that my job is herding cats. I would expect that might be the polite version of how those of us happening upon road work get mentioned.