Written by Rook Friday, 22 January 2010 00:00
I'm a pretty mellow person when it really boils down to it. Live and let live, I say. Most people don't particularly bother me when they do whatever it is that they do. Except there's this one, little, common problem that I see every day and makes me practically fly into a blind rage.
Stay off your goddamn cell phone if you're driving. Today, I almost got hit by a car. I wish I could say that this was a /rare/ occurrence, but it really isn't. I'd almost been hit FOUR times last year, and we're only three weeks into 2010 and I almost got hit /already./ What happened? Well, you see.
Every day I walk down to my parents house from my apartment, and take care of my dogs. My apartment is tiny, so the dogs can't live there with Sanct and I. Its a nice little two block walk from doorstep to doorstep, and normally, only a handful of cars pass me by when I walk down. I actually only have to cross one street that has active traffic, and normally, I have a good minute between cars to walk. Yes, my town is tiny. The road is a simple little two lane road. To make this a bit easier to visualize, I drew you a little diagram dealy:
Okay, so, every day I have to walk from the blue star to the pink star. As stated, its a nice relatively short walk. And every day, I cross the street at (or near) the orange diamond. It is worth noting that there are no cross walks on this end of town. It is a /really/ small town. Now, where I cross is in the blind spot of a bend that is down on the other side of the block. Due to the curve and the buildings, you actually can't see very far at all. Hence the term blind spot. Now, the people of my town are pretty smart cookies, and have posted the speed limit as 25MPH a decent amount of time /before/ the bend. (Before entering town, the speed limit is 45MPH, coming off of a rather steep hill and crossing a bridge.) There are signs warning that the speed limit is 25MPH ahead prior to even entering the town. Still, somehow, various assholes manage to completely screw this over. And what does that mean? It means that every time someone comes from the south end of town on a goddamn cellphone, they miss the three signs warning them to slow down and somehow think its fine to go through an obvious blind spot at about 40-45MPH (sometimes 50+, though) and I almost end up getting hit.
Today's lady, though, was pretty special. As I was crossing the street, she zoomed into town at about 50ish if I had to guess and almost plowed me over. I managed to get away with a few seconds to spare, and this maniac laid on the breaks and the horn, I turned around and caught a glimpse of what she was doing. Squashed between her shoulder and ear was a cell phone. In her left hand was a cup of coffee. In her right hand was a tube of lipstick. This means that this crazy ass driver was actually attempting to hold three individual objects and try to do three separate things at once. Things that take sane people three individual steps. There is a point in life where multitasking is no longer a needed skill, and is something that will probably get your ass killed.
Regardless. When all was said and done, she ended up driving relatively slow through town, though I could see that she was angrily glaring back at me in her rear view mirror. But, I'm not dead, so at least I have that going for me.
It still baffles me that I have friends and relatives who attempt to drive while texting, eating something that is incredibly hands on (giant burgers, slices of pizza, etc etc), talking on a cell phone and all this jive. And my favorite part is that they always seem somewhat offended when I get nervous. Never mind the fact that one friend actually almost ran her car into a fence while I was with her. We laugh about it now, but at that time I was actually pretty pissed. But, to their credit, both of them have stopped doing it as much when I'm riding with them. Its kinda nice to see that they don't want me to be all panicky. Or they don't want me to glare holes into the sides of their heads. Either or.
Cell phones! Geeze!
Dear Facebook Movie: Fuck you. No one cares about your shitty movie. Fuck fuck fuck fuck you.
About Rook
My name is Rook, and I'm the sole writer for A Fork in the Socket (aFitS) - my personal blog. I'm a pretend writer, I'm a full-fledged twitter addict, and above all I'm a die-hard geek. You can find out more about me right here.
Comments
RSS feed for comments to this post.