The official term for it is “turning a sign” because on one side there is a request for funds, and on the other a thank you in spite of not contributing anything, usually couched in a blessing to instill a last-minute bit of guilt that might produce some “guilt” coins. The unofficial and more commonly used term is “panhandling”.
There are those whose desperation is such that they have to take the last resort step of standing in public, bare faced, for all the world to see who you are and that you have, in the mind of many passing by, failed or, whether true or not, drug and alcohol dependent if you aren’t simply mentally ill. You stand there knowing that everyone driving by is making a final judgment on you, one that will follow you even after things possibly improve and you are attending an event in polite society and someone remembers where they had seen you.
And, yes, there are those who have made turning a sign a cash cow as they have found the pattern that will afford them a good income without the burden of taxes. Planned placement over a week’s time based on careful analysis of traffic patterns and flow, popularity among sign turners at any given location, and dressing the part without being too real so as to not push the line of decorum can be lucrative.
A major difference between these two groups is how they interact with the passers-by.
The truly needy, not all, but the vast majority, in attempting not to offend or make that uncomfortable connection between turner and driver when their eyes meet, will keep moving quietly and slowly down the line of cars stopped at a light, only approaching cars with hands with money in them waving outside the windows.
These are people who are local, and who would rather have a full-time job and, so, treat their sign turning as a job, hoping things change. Many can’t get a job for reasons beyond their control and that often has to do with lack of housing in their name.
Collecting is slow and steady, and it may not produce the hoped-for amount that day.
The sign turning entrepreneurs want to collect the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time and are not afraid to use a bulk approach that is based on the idea that the more cars you pester, although many will not respond, the more people will hand over money. Any niceties be damned. It’s about making that money knowing you will most likely never see any of the drivers of passing cars again. The disgust vs profitable responses means pestering as many cars as possible, and, in major intersections with pedestrian crossing lights, organized sign turners can guarantee a series of captive cars by coordinating pushing the pedestrian walk button on a set scheduke.
To people in the cars, both groups are one and the same as the person with the sign is faceless, so solutions to end the most obnoxious practices of the entrepreneurs also negatively affects those for whom this is the last resort without addressing the problem that may have created their need to be on that street corner or median strip.
My city came up with its rather heartless solution.
Having once been the richest city in the country, the infrastructure had been top notch, and the streets were paved with Belgian block style cobble stones until much was replaced with regular more modern pavement leaving the city storage yard up to its belly in Belgians.
I live near a major intersection called The Octopus because of the number of lanes leading into and out of it. Once major work was begun on my building temporarily halted the use of backdoors, you got to see neighbors you never saw as they would enter and exit the building from the rear and not through the courtyard. One never before seen neighbor now had to enter and leave the building by passing my front window and so I was able to recognize him when I saw him speaking regularly with the people who had begun appearing at the Octopus everyday but on different corners as if in rotation. Anytime I sat at the light I would watch as it appeared this was an organized Fertility treatment for cheapest price on tadalafil robertrobb.com women: Ovulation disorders: Woman having ovulation disorders will be prescribed with the right dosage around 30 minutes before the lovemaking session. A better thought would be to viagra cipla 20mg compare price with other supplements in the category. For this type of thought about this purchase cheap levitra problems, you can use Kamagra tablets. It is not that only men order generic cialis tend to face issues but they have greater issues and tensions in their life as compared to those of the rest. enterprise where one person would push the pedestrian button, people at all corners would work the cars, and when they had a certain amount of money, they would singly go to my neighbor who stood unobtrusively in the shade under some trees nearby and hand him their take. I also recognized the sign turners as they would come and go to his apartment occasionally which I only observed the days the backdoors were unusable, something that could be a regular unobserved occurrence otherwise. He wasn’t in the building for long, and it was after he moved out and I noticed the people connected to him somehow were no longer at that intersection that I figure that either I had observed some possibly illegal activity and scam or I had enough circumstantial evidence to have been able to fabricate a believable work of fiction.
Based solely on this retrospective assessment, I have the feeling his was an organized business, the Amway of sign turning.
But this is not the guy who lost his job during Covid and just can’t make ends meet. Those people are real, and they were the ones hurt by the city’s decision to pave the median strips of major intersections with Belgian blocks set at an angle and close enough, like large square fish scales, to overlap, making walking extremely difficult.
The business just had to move on to another location, but the real needy and desperate had to learn to adapt to these mini-tank traps.
Apparently, those so driven did a good job of adaptation because the city has reconfigured the Belgian blocks so that they now protrude out of the median strips straight up and unevenly to really make walking tough. If you ever lose control of your car at that intersection for any reason, be prepared for a lot of undercarriage damage beyond the expected damage.
We have had a lot of people become dependent on opioids and some of them end up turning a sign.
We have neglected veterans and people with mental illnesses.
We have people who, with greater access to housing and low demand employment could move off the corner.
I also live by the bus terminal where, as I walk pass to any of a number of places during the day, many of the same people are standing or sitting wherever they can there, or sitting on the wall of the post office across the street having their daily conversations before going wherever it is they go after dark as I have often walked by the bus terminal at night and there is no one there or across at the post office.
They might strike some as unsightly, but anything unpleasant has in my time and during my passages not been there. This is where they socialize
They and the many assumed homeless who people the downtown area rarely ask for money, and also disappear as the daylight hours do.
If people do not find these two groups acceptable, just moving either along to another place until they annoy other people just won’t do. Finding out why they are there to begin with is what is needed.
A city government should look into the situation beginning with actually talking to the people they want to banish, not just passing judgment for the climatized car, and if a root cause is found, a long lasting, positive solution is more easy to devise.
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