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I opened my brain, and look what fell out

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Driven to hatred

You know what I hate?
Bad drivers.
Not that I think that there are there are those among us who like the people who plague the asphalt like chiggers in a Kansas field in July, but I think I'm haunted by bad drivers:
*Oct. 1999: An 18-year-old driver runs a red light at about 20 miles over the speed limit, hitting and totalling my beloved green 1993 Ford Tempo.
*Jan. 2000: An accident at an intersection pushes a car into my 1999 Ford Contour, the car I had to buy because my Tempo had been totalled.
*April 2000: A kid pissed that a ticket salesgirl at a movie theater wouldn't sell him a ticket to an R-rated movie spins out in the parking lot, loses control of his pickup truck and hits my car. (This is the only one of the three accidents I wasn't in the car to experience. The theater manager had to interrupt my viewing "The Skulls" with my fabulous friend Howard to tell me my car had been hit. Howard came with me and once we hit the hall, the first words out of his mouth were, "God, that movie is so shitty." Oh, Howard, how I love you!)
And that's not even counting the endless role call of drivers who must be trying to use their cars to crawl up my ass using their cars.
So I'm uniquely qualified to pass judgment on bad drivers.
Last night, I was driving home from the store on a road that has several stop signs. I was coming up at an intersection at which two cars were already stopped when a car comes rocketing up behind me (also, it was well past dusk and the guy didn't have his signals on -- don't EVEN get me started on that gem).
Where did he think he was going? It's a stop SIGN, not a LIGHT. It's not like there's a green to catch. Even if he had a clear shot to the intersection, he still has to stop.
And once we got past the obstacle of the stop sign, he started swerving back and forth. If it was to check how the traffic was in front of him, I have a simple word problem for him:
Q: If there are three cars in front of you when you stop at a stop sign, and none have turned off the road, how many cars are in front of you?
A: Three.
That's not a question you're going to find on the new and improved (?) SAT.
I know the answer and I'm not even that great at math.
There are THREE CARS in front of you. Deal with it.
At the next stop sign, he speeds up the left turn lane (again, he has to stop 'cause it's a STOP SIGN!).
And blessedly makes the friggin' turn, allowing me to quit worrying about getting a car grill up my ass.
It's funny, 'cause bad drivers have irritated me for years. I just don't see the point in driving badly. If you're late somewhere, most people will wait. Besides, you should have left earlier. If you forget a turn you needed to make, turn around and catch it. If you're in the far left lane and need to make a right-hand turn, backtrack.
A friend of mine once said that her trick to handling bad drivers was to imagine that they're doctors on their way to a life-or-death situation.
Funny, though, that all the drivers behind me seem to be proctologists.

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