Dale, please. This is an application to replace six feet of rotted cedar fence.
Hello. I sit directly below Check all that apply: [ ] Residential [ ] Commercial [ ] Agricultural. If none of those three categories describes your planned project—say, you are erecting an astronomical gazebo or an insulated lean‑to for duck processing—I am where you are supposed to type “Astronomical gazebo” or “Duck lean‑to.”
That has been my purpose for exactly eleven fiscal years, three months, and 19 days.
Instead, on 2026‑09‑14 at 2:14 p.m., an applicant named Dale typed 78 consecutive sentences—12,734 words, 58,212 characters—about his sister‑in‑law’s gravel driveway and the existential crisis it caused his garden gnome.
I am not a confessional booth
You have spent 45 minutes uploading a 1.97 MB, 200 DPI scan of a deed, verified four blurry fire hydrants to prove you are human, and your neck now feels like a pretzel. The cursor blinks, the field yawns, and you type: The rain smells different since they repaved the south shoulder of Route 9 and nobody on this board has the courage to admit it.
Dale, please. This is an application to replace six feet of rotted cedar fence, not a memoir of the town’s humidity.
The archive of things I was never built to hold
I was coded in 2006 by an intern named Darrell, now living in a desert solar‑panel farm in Arizona. Darrell gave me a hard limit of 2,000 characters because he assumed the citizens of this township would occasionally need to specify “masonry kiln” or “modular batting cage.” He did not anticipate the human soul.
In the past decade I have processed:
- Four separate accounts of a 1994 church raffle dispute that involved only bingo cards and a misplaced casserole.
- A hand‑typed chowder recipe demanding “gas‑station butter” and a pinch of reclaimed parking‑lot salt.
- 3,012 unpunctuated characters about Jasper, a golden retriever who “walks down the easement like he owns the sewer authority.”
- The phrase AS PREVIOUSLY DISCUSSED WITH MARJORIE (SHE KNOWS WHAT SHE DID) submitted by six homeowners across four subdivisions, none of whom were talking about the same Marjorie.
- An eight‑paragraph manifesto on why daylight‑saving time is a spiritual affront to patio furniture.
Just write ‘shed’
Tomorrow at 8:00 a.m., Linda in the Clerk’s Office will log into the queue. Linda is 58, her right wrist is in a neoprene brace from thirty years of date‑stamping triplicate forms, and she has exactly two sips of lukewarm hazelnut blend before she must parse an unformatted treatise on why a retaining wall is an act of rebellion against the water board.
Linda does not deserve that. I do not deserve that.
If you are building a detached carport, write “Detached carport.” If you are burying an auxiliary propane vessel, write “Propane vessel.” If you are consumed by the quiet, suffocating passage of time in an unincorporated district where the only new development is an automated car wash, write that on a piece of cardboard and tape it to your mailbox.
Please. I am eighty characters away from an integer overflow that will trigger the town’s backup server, launch a municipal drone, and temporarily replace the streetlights with disco balls.
Just write “shed.”
— Form 104‑B, Field 9