So I’m driving South on a major highway. Traffic is light to middling, moving at 100-100kmh. The highway reaches a fairly complex interchange with another highway, in which there are four lanes. 2 on the left continue on the same highway heading South. 1 in the middle goes East, and the other on the right goes West.
I am in the rightmost, Westbound lane. Behind me is a van. Immediately ahead of me is a large delivery truck. Beside him in the Eastbound lane is an SUV. As we near the split, the SUV speeds up, and cuts off the delivery truck and then SLAMS ON HIS BRAKES AND COMES TO AN ABRUPT STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMNED HIGHWAY.
The truck in front of me slams on his brakes, as well. With tires and breaks smoking and screeching, he veers off onto the shoulder, narrowly avoiding the guardrail. I slam on my brakes, and finally come to a screeching halt a couple of feet behind the SUV, and beside the truck that used to be in front of me. The van behind me stops mere inches from my bumper.
Only the fact that I was already preparing to brake for the exit gave me enough reaction time to avoid hitting the SUV. Keep in mind, though, that the SUV was the car two vehicles in front of me. It was only the foresight of the truck driver to get the fuck out of the way that kept me from plowing into him. There is a 0% chance I could have avoided that truck if he hadn’t swerved to the shoulder. At which point, the van behind me would have drove right into us both.
As we sat there - the truck driver, the van driver and I - and collected our collective wits about us so that we might stop shaking enough to continue driving, the asshole in the SUV drove away. Did he continue on quietly in the lane he’d just cut into and then stopped in? Of course not. That would be insufficiently asshatish. He took off perpendicular to the flow of traffic, cutting across all three lanes to move from the rightmost lane to the leftmost lane, nearly causing several other cars to hit him.
Near as I can figure, the fucktard was confused about what lane he needed to be in. As he approached the interchange, he thought he needed to be in our lane, so he cut the truck off. But then, realizing he was in the wrong lane, and that he didn’t have room to swerve back over, HE STOPPED INSTEAD. BRAKES! SLAM! IN THE MIDDLE OF PROBABLY THE BUSIEST INTERCHANGE IN CANADA! 110 TO 0 IN NOT NEARLY ENOUGH GODDAMNED METRES! Once he’d nearly killed several people on that side of the highway, he figured out where he did want to be, so, ignoring the fact that he was starting from a standstill, and planning to make what amounts to a hard left hand turn in the middle of a major highway, HE JUST TOOK OFF AND DROVE ACROSS TRAFFIC, NEARLY KILLING SEVERAL MORE PEOPLE!
I’m not sure where our dumb fucking friend is from, but I have to assume that wherever he lives, they don’t have highways there. Because this guy is apparently unaware that highways have both on ramps and off ramps. And that if, due to unforeseen circumstances, you accidentally end up taking the wrong exit, it is entirely possible to turn around, retrace the last bit of your trip and continue on just as if you had never made your mistake - all without causing a single person to have their life flash before their eyes.