Orange is new black in our road cone world
Some people think road cones are boring. They’re wrong. The story of the road cone is a feel-good Kiwi tale of success, lives saved and drunken humour.
With massive infrastructure projects in some cities and rebuilds in others, road cones have never been a bigger part of the New Zealand way of life. We have more road cones per head of population than any country on earth (probably).
I’m talking about the cones on the road here. Not the ones behind desks. A road cone on the road is for safety and traffic direction. Human road cones are non-reflective, talentless job-huggers who do nothing but block things from happening. Employed placeholders with no ideas. You probably have a few in your office.
I first became interested in road cones growing up in Dunedin. Like many teenage New Zealanders I enjoyed stealing them and putting them on statues and up trees. One evening my mate The Cooz and I stole 11 road cones and placed them carefully in his sister’s bedroom while she was out. It was a great joke until The Cooz’ dad found out and yelled at us.
He claimed we had stolen $1100 worth of taxpayers’ property. We could go to jail, some one could have died. He also claimed we’d nicked sherry and gin from his liquor cabinet to make rocket fuel. (Which was true). He made us return all 11 road cones to George St in sober daylight. Humiliating.
But do road cones really cost $100 each? If so that’s a lot of money just sitting out on our roads. Right now I can see $600 hanging around a tree on my street. You probably passed $10,000 on your way to work. Frankly I doubt it.
But why speculate? For some much-needed road cone facts I went to our biggest manufacturer of them, Proline Plastics Limited.
It was everything I had dreamed of and more. The Willy Wonka of this operation is general manager Cameron Smith.
A man who oversees the production of thousands of road