Incoherent Babble

Well, everyone’s been whining that I haven’t written a blog entry in a whole 6 days, so I figured I’d outline the fairly interesting beginning to my day.

I left the house about 8:00, so I was already running pretty late for work. Normally I try to leave about 10 till, which puts me about 15 minutes late. At the first light I reach, I make my turn behind a woman in a little Tercel, with a temporary handicap tag hanging from her mirror. As expected, she was less than aggressive when it came to driving. After doing 5 miles under the speed limit behind her, I was in a dire hurry to get out on some open road so I could hit my typical 60 (I think the highest speed limit along the way is 40, if that…).

For some reason, at the intersection at the 2nd light along my daily trip, they decided to make the road 4 lanes, providing not only a right turn lane in each direction, but also a short right lane on the opposite side of the intersection, which merges left in a few hundred feet. At this intersection, it’s typical for those in a hurry or those trapped behind old ladies with blue hair to pull into the right lane and floor it when the light turns green to beat the person in front of them through the intersection.

In the hurry that I was in this particular morning, I, of course, pull into the right lane and swiftly accelerate as soon as the light changes. The moment we get into the middle of the 4 lane road we’re crossing, I realize the woman in the Tercel is going to try and make it tough on me, because she too has floored her roller skate. I know that as soon as I drop back behind her, she’d slow down to her previous crawl out of spite, so I totally floor it, pulling ahead of her just enough to change lanes before mine ran out.

A few hundred more feet down the road, this angry woman decides I was somehow in the wrong (even though I had done nothing to indicate I was in any way perturbed at her, and I’d even signaled as I changed lanes with her trying to head me off), and flips on her bright lights. Because it was foggy and rainy and everyone already had their lights on, it took me a few moments to realize that she had in fact done what I thought she had.

While up to this point I had been content to ignore her aggressiveness thus far, this kind of unwarranted disrespect could not go on unchecked. Just before our light had changed back down the street, a pickup truck had made the turn into the lane in front of us (yeah, so when she floored it I had to make sure I cleared her bumper without hitting the truck in front of me). Just after she flipped her brights on, the truck ahead of me had to turn. In response to her lights, I waited to the last minute to brake and then slammed them on, causing her to do the same, with even more force. Then, after the truck turned, I simply decided not to speed back up. For over a mile, we traveled (even though I was in an extreme hurry) at a max of 20 mph. By the time we reached the next intersection, she’d gotten extremely perturbed, but decided to flip her brights off when she saw all the cars waiting at the light. After this, I assumed the ‘battle’ was over, and I quickly returned to my normal 60-ish pace.

By the time I got to my next turn, this crazy woman had caught back up to me, and as I pulled into the turn lane to make my turn, she slammed on the horn. While it did occur to me to cut back behind her and flip on my brights as I followed her to wherever she was going, I figured that’s probably how people end up getting shot as a result of road rage. Who knows, that might be how she got the temporary handicapped tag. So I consoled myself by simply giving her the finger, as I realized all this had happened with her daughter in the passenger seat next to her, obviously totally oblivious to the entire incident.

After that, I proceeded on my way to work, thinking evil things about that woman. When I got to work, I relayed the story to everyone there, and they were equally surprised. Anyway, that’s my best road rage story so far, and it didn’t even have anything to do with my rage. In this instance, I was simply the unfortunate victim of the rage, and was rewarded with a new perspective on life…