Do you two not have one scrotum lick of common sense?

The BBQ Pit
1

Before I begin, I must make a confession and a disclaimer. There are posters among us who can make the Pit rant a thing of beauty; artisans at their craft, they leave the reader with palpable sense of wonder at their lyrically-spewed bile and rage, their merciless decimation of their fellow man.

I, regrettably, am not one of them. Nevertheless, I invite the casual reader to feast in my tale of indignation, and perhaps join in condemnation of these idiots if so inclined.

To make a tedious story short, my car needs some work. There’s a garage about a mile away, so I took it there with the intention of dropping it off and just walking back home. On the way over, I rounded a corner and discovered to my surprise pedestrians, not just on the side of the road, but actually ON the roadway.

Now, I should at this point pause to describe the idiocy of this situation. The road in question is a twisty, no-shouldered, two-lane county highway with a 50mph speed limit. So it would seem to go without saying that the blacktop isn’t the best place for two teenaged girls to be strolling along without a care in the world, unless they were actively seeking their own untimely demise.

But fortunately, they were on the other side of the road, so I just eased past them and muttered derogatory remarks about their breeding under my breath, figuring that they must be going to a neighbor’s house along the road and would be out of harm’s way in a minute or two. A stupid way to do it, but whaddayagonnado?

So I was a bit perplexed to see them off in the distance ahead a short time after beginning my walk back. While I carefully picked my way along the weedy growth on the side of the road, there they were, still tooling carefree down the middle of the road, going from side to side and taking up most of an entire lane, playing like they were out for a walk in the park instead of on a HIGHWAY, for fuck’s sake.

And that’s when I noticed something that had escaped me the first time: they had a STROLLER with them. Yes, in addition to being completely idiotic twatmongers putting their own lives in remarkable danger, they were also doing this while pushing around a defenseless BABY.

It literally boggled my mind. And since we were both walking in the same direction, I got a birds-eye view of their antics for the next 3/4ths of a mile while they continued their idiocy unabated. Their, uh, “strategy” was whenever they heard a car coming, they would just switch sides, so that instead of hogging all of the lane the car was coming in, they would just hog all of the other lane instead - a truly brilliant tactic on a road with several blind curves.

Finally, I caught up with them.

“Hey!” they said, friendly but surprised to see someone else on foot.

“Don’t you think it might be better to walk on the side of the road?” I asked.

Blank stares all around.

“You know, if for no other reason than because of the kid?” (which was clearly no more than a few months old)

More blank stares, this time with a touch of hostility.

“Just a thought.”

“Thanks.”

I didn’t pursue it any further, because I know full well the uselessness of lecturing someone who’s dumber than a sack of hammers.

But here’s the deal, Bitchtit 1 and Bitchtit 2. You’re lucky I didn’t have a dull razor blade on me, because from now on I’ll make sure to. And if I ever, EVER see you pulling that kind of crap again, PARTICULARLY with a defenseless infant, I will be using said razor to come for your ovaries. You’ve already proven yourself incapable to be a parent of the child you currently have, and the LAST thing this world needs is for you to pop out some more kids and propagate your genes before the inevitable Fist of Darwin comes to smite you from this Earth.

And you’re particularly lucky that I did have my cell phone on me, because you can bet cash money that I would have had the police and the child services people out there so fast it would make your heads spin, perhaps producing a pleasing maraca-like noise as your tiny pea brains rattle around in your skulls.

Consider yourself warned. There will not be a second warning.

2

Yup, that’s stupid. They weren’t even walking against the flow of traffic, like every schoolkid is taught to do when they must walk near traffic. These are probably the same idiots-with-ovaries that you see waiting at a light with the baby stroller stuck out in front of them, almost (and sometimes right) into traffic. Or jaywalking a busy street, with the baby stroller. Or not making any effort to find out where their children are playing, and crying and sobbing on the news when their precious dear is killed in a freak accident in a drainage ditch, etc.

3

I trust someone will add “Fist of Darwin” or perhaps “Darwin’s Fist” to the list of band names then?
Anyhoo, this kind of crap drives me up a wall. If you want to gamble with your life, by all means go ahead. Adding an infant to the mix means you haven’t the sense God (or god) gave a cockroach. If one of life’s cruelest ironies, these dipshits are usually the most fertile people around, ensuring many infant-jeopardizing moments to come in the future.

I would keep that cell phone at the ready, schief2

4

Amazing … the same thing happened to me this morning, on the way to work. To their credit, the two teenaged girls were walking on a street in a neighborhood, waiting for their schoolbus to arrive. What gets me, though, is that they turned around, saw me coming, and didn’t amble out of the way. The prevailing thought seemed to be that I’d swerve into the other lane to miss them. Which I did. I just resented their squatter’s-rights approach to the road.

5

I thought it was quite a good rant. It started off wobbly, a bit hesitant. When you finally got into your groove, it was a concise and easy to read tirade.

“Bitchtit1 and Bitchtit2” and “Fist of Darwin” were beautiful.

6

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DARLING CHILDREN!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!

God forbid that they simply evaluate the risks at a different level than you do. They’ve obviously walked several miles in this manner without being killed. They seem to be doing a good job of getting out of the way of cars (note that they are not walking on the side of oncoming traffic because they are intentially avoiding oncoming traffic). Perhaps pushing a stroller through “the weedy growth on the side of the road” is difficult and they are perfectly capable of making decisions on how to proceed without your intervention.

Yeah, you could have hit them! IF THEY HADN’T AVOIDED THE PROBLEM!

Having walked many country roads in my life I have managed to survive quite handily without forcing myself through the brush. You honestly can hear cars from several hundred yards away. And blind curves are easy - just stay on the side of the street you can see.

I choose to believe, instead, that you are simple penis-wrinkle who feels that any risk at all is too much risk and, further, that your risk-assessment is the only valid assessment. This certainty of your seat on the high horse then validates your intrusive attempts to tell other people how they’ve strayed.

But, I could be wrong.

7

Well, duh. How do you think they pass on their genes? They have enough kids that even when half of them die in “freak” accidents, there’s still more of them than there were last generation.

“Whattamean, I’m an unsafe driver 'cause I’m driving drunk? I’ve done it plenty of times before, and I ain’t dead yet, am I?”

8

A penis-wrinkle? Sir, that is an insult and I demand satisfaction!

Under more lenient circumstances I wouldn’t be too inclined to go off on them, because as a solitary pedestrian I could hear cars coming too, but I assure you they were no run-of-the-mill morons. These two were laughing and joking and weaving the stroller back and forth across both sides of the highway, instead of listening for traffic like I was (indeed, there were several times where they didn’t notice a car behind them until it was pretty close).

So you’ve walked on a few country roads. BFD. Would you do it for over a mile while pushing your kid in a stroller, over a road that’s getting several cars per minute? If so, then perhaps there’s a Fist of Darwin and dull razor blade in your future too.

9

Satisfaction?

The Ryan: You gave more reasons to assume stupidity and risk in one sentence than shief2 gave in his entire original post.

Fortunately, in the final two paragraphs schief gives several reasons the support his assumption of stupidity (they weren’t paying attention, they failed to adequately responde several time, the road has lots of traffic) that were not covered in the original post.

I, however, had only what information he gave with which to craft a response.

shief: If the road is as busy as you describe then no, I likely would not. But that’s because when there are lots of cars you can’t tell where they are by sound; if it were a lightly travelled road, I may very well walk on the blacktop. There may be a Fist of Darwin in my future, but if you try to come after my ovaries, there will be hell to pay.

10

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think either of those two brainless wonders, was the mother of the child?
I only point this out because its one thing for someone with an IQ one point higher than a plant to put their own child in danger and quite another if they were say, BABYSITTING!!! YE GODS! I would have called the cops.

11

I grew up travelling moderately-busy country roads by foot. There were no sidewalks, steep berms, and deep, overgrown ditches. While the strategy these two were employing might be one I would utilize were I walking alone or with a friend my age, it would certainly have been wiser to walk closer to the edge of the road and pull the stroller into unpaved territory when cars approached. In other words, they weren’t totally out of their minds, but extra caution would have been more than appropriate.

What road was this, schief? I live in Columbia, too. If I know the road, perhaps I can give the furriners some insight as to whether they really were bugshit crazy for walking like this. I mean, it wasn’t Providence or Old 63 or something, was it?

12

featherlou said:

The OP stated:

I took that to mean they were on the other side. Silly to be wandering well out in the lane, and this is really stupid:

Then again it was stated that there was no shoulder, so where else could they go? :wink:

In the overall scheme of things, not a very good rant. Sorry:)

13

There you go. If I, for some unavoidable reason, had no other way to transport myself and this kid from one place to another than via walking along this road, I certainly wouldn’t have done in the manner described because it was pretty frickin’ ridiculous. Zigzagging the stroller from one edge of the road to the other while laughing with your friend and getting to “safety” from traffic by going and standing in the other lane wouldn’t be my choice of tactics.

If they’d been hunkered down, alert, and acted like they just wanted to get it over with, that’d be one thing. But they seemed more like they were at the mall than on a highway.

**

No, it’s ZZ off of Broadway out on the western side of town. It’s not unlike Old 63 south of Stadium, except a bit less hilly and a bit less trafficked.