Deer me — it's another sign of the times

A 2032 headline: "Highway accident blamed on driver not updating his Tesla's Mastodon recognition software."

That's the last line of this piece. How, you ask, do we get there? Well, let's back up a bit.

Driving down a residential street the other day at the prescribed speed of 20 miles per hour — so slow you can actually feel your car depreciate in value — I noted a traffic sign that had nothing on it. The yellow diamond was blank; the yellow rectangle below was blank, as well. I considered several possible reasons:

1. The universe had rebooted over night, but an interrupted network connection prevented all the graphics from loading. If that were the case, I didn't want to look at my driver's license. If the public signs didn't load, then my license will be blank, and that'll be proof we live in a computer simulation. Just my luck to end up in this one, and not the one where dogs can talk and winter lasts a month. Then again, if dogs could say only "poop" or "sqirl," it would be better if they kept silent.

2. The sign would soon be painted with a new warning, like "Slow Children Crossing," in case there's a bunch of slow children in the neighborhood.

3. It used to warn about deer.

MnDOT recently announced it is retiring all the deer crossing warning signs because no one paid any attention to them. Makes sense. I never slowed down when I saw that sign. For one thing, the icon of the deer made it look as if he could clear my car with no problem. Dude's flying!

1. Subjective guesswork: If I were a deer, this would be a nice place to cross. Good sight lines, lack of obstacles by the roadside, fairly narrow road, absence of brethren carcasses.

2. Someone hit a deer here once. This would be like marking a spot where lightning hit. Perhaps other deer would be less likely to use this spot.

"Hey, let's cross here."

"No way, there's a sign. Didn't you hear what happened to Hank? Peterbilt comes out of nowhere, and boom, dude looked like he was auditioning for Santa's sleigh. Thought he was going to bounce off the moon."

"How do you know what a Peterbilt is? Are you a deer, or two MnDOT employees in a deer suit?"

"Is that you in there, Frank? Who's bringing up the rear?"

"The intern."

3. The signs are placed at random just to make us slow down. Perhaps, but if MnDOT really wanted to do that, there would be an icon of a deer standing on its back legs pointing a rifle at oncoming cars.

The press release about the signage had an interesting line: "Signs that alert drivers to infrequent encounters or possible situations, such as deer crossing, children at play, or playground warning signs, do not have a consistent impact on driver behavior."

This means we put deer in the same category as children, then? Granted, I don't always take my foot off the gas when I see "Children at play," because for all I know they're indoors on the second floor, playing Monopoly.

But I have an idea. Never mind the signs. Put a life-sized deer on the side of the road, and people would be more likely to slow down. Don't have the deer look at you and make eye contact, because people figure, "He sees me, he's not going to do anything stupid." They should just look ahead, serenely, unaware. It doesn't even have to be a deer. Put a big plastic hippo by the side of the road every 15 miles.

You might have heard about attempts to clone and revive the mastodon, based on ancient reconstructed DNA. It would only be a matter of time before one of them escaped or herds were released into the wild to perform some ecological rebalancing, like managing the deer herds. (They don't prey on them, they just step on them by accident.) Perhaps then we'll get MASTODON CROSSING signs. People will take them seriously. Or not, because they trust their self-driving car to do the right thing. And hence:

A 2032 headline: "Highway accident blamed on driver not updating his Tesla's Mastodon recognition software"

See? Now it all makes sense.