Name Snowplows: What You Do With Too Much Spare Time

If any of you readers are from Minnesota, I have a suggestion for what you could do with all of that spare time you have as a result of being trapped in your snow-covered houses for months on end: start naming snowplows. I’m not kidding. Apparently, and I swear this is true, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) conducts a ‘Name the Snowplow‘ contest every year. The winner gets to compete in the Ms. Winter Wonderland contest as the state representative.

Finalists for the 2023-2024 season, and I’m not making these up, include:

• Darth Bladder
• Beyonsleigh
• Taylor Drift
• Aaron Brrrr

Maybe it’s just me, but ‘Taylor Drift’ is wholly inappropriate for a snowplow, especially since the killer snow removal machines of which I speak do more work in an hour than most celebrity pretty faces do in a year. If MnDOT plans to carry on the name, I suppose one of their new plows should be named after Travis Kelce. They could go out together, with fabricated hands mounted on the sides, hands that could be held together as the plows work in tandem. It would be so adorable.

What? Me suggest a name? Sorry, Minnesotans. I don’t have enough spare time to sit around and test out endless names on my wife until she either laughs at one or attacks me with an ice cream scoop — which just happens to be the closest thing we have to a snow shovel in our house.

Do Snowplows Have Gender?

Naming snowplows seems about as productive as arguing over whether people have gender or sex. But forget people for now. Do snowplows have gender? I mean, we refer to cruise ships, aircraft carriers, catamarans, dinghies, and every other conceivable type of watercraft as ‘she’.  Likewise, a truck driver will say something like, “She’s a real beaut!” while showing off his new tractor down at the interstate truck stop just outside of the world-famous Winslow, AZ.

Speaking of Winslow, who was actually standing on the corner watching paint dry when that flatbed Ford drove by: Jackson Browne or Glenn Frey? And did the flatbed Ford possess a feminine name bestowed upon it by it’s oh-so-eager-to-pick-up-strangers owner? These are the things I think about, which is why I really don’t have the time to name snowplows.

Getting back to said snowplows and the gender question, they could only be female. First of all, snowplows are pushy. Second, the best drivers can do is strap themselves in, hit the accelerator, and go for the ride. The plow will do what it wants to do.

Above all, snowplows are extremely high maintenance. They cost a ton of money and time to keep them operational. The payoff is that a plow will run forever if you treat her right.

Step Right Up and Play

Perhaps the gender question is less important than what the winners of the annual contest get — which is basically nothing other than the ability to say that you thought of a name you would never give your own child, unless mother birthed a strapping 26-ton baby complete with plow harness and frame.

So step right up and play the snowplow naming game. Well, you can’t actually get in on the 2023-2024 action now. The contest has come to an end, and not a moment too soon based on some of the suggestions. But there’s always next season, right?

One last thing before I end the insanity that is this post: Minnesota can’t lay claim to being the only namer of snowplows. They got the idea from none other than Scotland. They are joined in the U.S. by the state of New Mexico (motto: Thicker and More Absorbent than Old Mexico) and the city of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Onward and upward all of you snowplow naming people. Or should I say ‘forward’? That’s probably a better direction for the machines that bear your creative monikers.