Have you ever been driving down the road when you had the almost uncontrollable urge to pull over, grab another driver by the shirt and shake them until they promised to become a better driver? Or is it that just me?
Every morning, and again every afternoon, I make the 20-minute drive to and from work, and every day, it seems there are more people on the road who don’t know how to drive.
I won’t sit here pretending to be the world’s best driver. I’ve crashed a couple times, although I will point out that deer I hit was obviously suicidal, and the time I slammed on the brakes on icy roads and managed to crash in between the light pole and the tree, while the police said that was the best crashing they’d ever seen. In any event, those accidents taught me a lesson, and now there are some roads I refuse to drive on from November until March. (They’re obviously cursed.) The point is, I know my limitations.
A lot of the drivers I meet on Route 12 or 23 don’t have that basic amount of common sense. They either drive as fast as is humanly possible on the straight away, tail-gating every other driver they meet until the get the chance to pass, usually in a not so safe way, or they take the average of the speed limit signs, and instead of driving the actual speed limit, they go 42.5 miles through the 30 mile per hour zones and the 55, only speeding up when they come to a passing lane, causing every other driver on the road to become enraged and wish them bodily harm.
Yesterday, I was driving home from work with my adorable baby in the back seat. (Rude drivers always bother me more when my baby is in the back seat.) I was traveling slightly faster than the posted speed, but apparently when I slowed down for a 30 mile per hour zone, I made the driver behind me quite angry. He buzzed up, approximately 5 feet from my bumper and stayed there, no matter how fast or slow I went.
(The guy’s lucky it wasn’t my mother driving the car instead of me, because in Otselic Valley, she’s famous for pulling over teens who race each other down the roads. Legend has it her glare alone brought one particularly large seventeen year old boy to tears, but only mom and Tank know if that’s true.)
The driver continued to tail-gate, until we approached a relatively large piece of metal in the road, which he couldn’t see since he was so close to my bumper. I hit my breaks, which I thought was the appropriate action to take, but apparently that just made the other driver mad, because he started beeping his horn and flashing some not so friendly hand gestures.
In the end, although I wished I could, I didn’t grab him by the shirt and shake him. Instead I pulled over and let the jerk drive by, but the jokes on him, because I wrote down his plate number, and told my mom, and right now she’s on the look out for that particular Monte Carlo.