So my wife and I are in the truck, heading up to get stuff for making dinner. (For Seattle-ites, we were northbound on Aurora, around 100th, heading up to Central Market. Good store, if you haven’t been there. Anyhoo.)
It’s a main arterial, with two lanes in each direction, a turn lane in the center, and a “parking lane” on the curb where sometimes there are cars, and sometimes there aren’t. During the stretches there aren’t any cars in that lane, it becomes a short-duration driving lane. Kind of strange, but there it is.
Anyway, we’re in the right lane (I’m driving). Another car is on my left. The parking lane has cars in it. Everything’s going nice and smooth.
Then we get to a stretch where the parking lane is empty, so the car behind me moves over to the right. Apparently, traffic moving at ten over the limit isn’t fast enough, but hey, I don’t sweat it. At any rate, there are some parked cars coming up, so that car accelerates and manages to nose in a couple of vehicles ahead.
At the same time, another guy comes up behind us, really fast, tailgating like crazy. Then he zips to the right, into the parking lane. He’s driving a little sports car (I couldn’t tell immediately, but eventually saw it to be a silver BMW coupe), and he’s zipping around in a rather reckless fashion.
So he yanks over to the right and tries to get around me in the few yards he has before we get to where the parked cars make the parking lane non-driveable. The guy really doesn’t have enough room to do this; I would have to slam on my brakes to let him in. I have no problem with people driving too fast if it doesn’t actively endanger other drivers, but what this guy is doing is directly encroaching on my safety zone (and everyone else’s), so I elect to continue forward and not let force his way in. I didn’t speed up or do anything different to block him; I simply refused to cooperate with his unsafe maneuver.
So of course, he has to jam on the brakes and whip back into my lane, right behind us. He flashes the brights, then drops back a bit. In the rear-view mirror, I can see the guy in his car, leaning over and rummaging on the floor behind the passenger seat. For a moment, I have a really bad feeling for what he might be about to do.
After another block or so, a gap opens up on our right again. Immediately, the guy behind us floors it and whips around. As he passes, he slows for a brief instant–
WHAM!
A split-second of panic: what happened?
Then, as he speeds up, we see the tumbling, spinning soft drink cup arcing through the air, bouncing away from the side of our truck. The guy actually threw a full Slurpee at us.
By pure chance, we happen to be just a few blocks from a local police station, so I speed up right behind the guy, my wife copies down the license tag, and we make a quick right and go straight to the station. I’m a little steamed, but all I really wanted to do was report the guy. If it turned out he’d done this kind of thing before, maybe my report will actually have an impact and get this guy, who is clearly an insanely unsafe driver, off the streets. Beyond that, I’m not hoping for much.
Long story short, the cop behind the desk doesn’t really care. If there’s no property damage or injuries, they won’t really pay any attention. The cop would have been willing to do a quick computer check, except, as it turns out, the fact that the guy had a temporary paper tag in his window instead of an actual license plate means the cops have no way of looking the guy up right on the spot. By the time they got the relevant information through DMV channels and assigned a detective, the paper tag would be, for some bureaucratic reason, difficult to track down.
So now, after the fact, I’m not still mad, or anything like that, so it’s not like I have unrequited revenge fantasies eating me up. If I got worked up over every jerkoff driver on the road, I wouldn’t be able to leave the house. I’d actually forgotten about it until I came to browse the Dope today and remembered I had something from last night I wanted to post about, and thought about it for a moment. I figure the guy is his own worst enemy; eventually he’s going to throw something at an unmarked police car and get tossed in jail, or he’ll try his asshole driving maneuvers on an icy road and plow into an ATM or something. Or worse, he’ll hurt or kill somebody, and then he goes bye-bye long-time.
Really, I’m just struck (literally) by how ridiculously over-the-top this guy’s behavior was, as I’ve never had anything like this happen to me, and I figured it was worth sharing.
At least he wasn’t digging for a gun…