CHICAGO — If you didn’t already know that Oct. 3 is “Mean Girls” Day, you may have been baffled on your morning commute.
“Mean Girls” day marks a scene in the 2004 comedy where heartthrob Aaron Samuels asks Cady Heron, played by Lindsay Lohan, what day it is.
“It’s October third,” she replies.
In recent years, fans of the movie celebrate by wearing pink, sharing memes and quoting the movie as much as possible — which is what the Illinois Department of Transportation decided to do Thursday.
On the Kennedy Expressway Thursday, folks in traffic spotted the signs reading, “SLOWING DOWN IN WORK ZONES IS SO FETCH.”
Of course, “so fetch” is the trademark phrase of Gretchen Wieners, one of the mean girls of the movie. Wieners tries to make the saying popular throughout the course of the movie but is repeatedly shot down by her friends, who tell her to “stop trying to make fetch happen.”
IDOT has become known for its signs, which often feature jokes and pop culture references.
“We’re competing for folks’ attention just like anyone else,” Jamie Simone, bureau chief of program, project and safety outreach at IDOT, told the Tribune’s Heidi Stevens in June 2018. “The signs get stale after a while and just become part of the background. If we can catch someone’s attention for just a second and let them know there are life-and-death consequences when they’re on the road, that’s what we want to do.”
Fans of the signs can see what every one in the state says on the department’s website.