Goddamn that's ridiculous. I didn't realize how bad this kind of shit was until my wife wanted to get a new sign on the front of her business. She sublets part of a space and the larger business already has a sign out front, hanging above the sidewalk so in order for her to have a hanging sign, it would have to hang from the existing sign. Obviously lots of safety concerns there. But the process is so insanely opaque and arduous.

First she has to get approval from the local historic district council because they wouldn't want anything to ruin the charm of the neighborhood. And that's understandable, but they have no clearly defined guidelines and meet at 1PM on Wednesday once a month and when you run a business yourself and have no employees that means closing up. Oh and they'll overbook their agenda for these meetings so they might run out of time and fuck you, wait til next month. So she fills out the application and goes to the meeting and they tell her she needs a full artist rendering of the completed project from multiple angles and closeups of the sign itself and because she didn't already have it she'll have to pay an extra fee and "oh whoops, you didn't know you needed that? so sorry we didn't inform you sooner."

So she gets all of that done and goes back and it takes 2 meetings to get her approval but then its contingent on the city's DOT approving it because it hangs above a sidewalk and of course they didn't bother to tell her that before and she should have known. But of course the DOT has its own list of guidelines and requirements and only meets once or twice a month also during the day on a weekday and they won't approve anything on the first try just to make you squirm and even once you do you have to go back and talk to the historic district assholes again and at this point you're already almost $1000 in the hole for a sign that hasn't even been made yet and fuck it the sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk is good enough.