Well unfortunately I didn’t have a shottie with me, and it’s apparently illegal to kill tools. Or you’d be dead by now. Many times over.
No. Nonono. It is NOT my job to make OTHER people drive intelligently or safely. It is MY job to keep control of MY vehicle, not to fucking pull over, get out and go for a nature walk because other fuckers cannot apparently use any common goddamn sense. Fuck. That. Shit. You have to pass a written and driving test to get a license. “Do not follow too close” is most definately covered in the course material and something that will cause you to fail the practical. Therefore the other driver KNOWS, or KNEW at one point, how to drive safely. They’re simply too goddamn lazy to do so, and you want ME and everyone else to have to adjust for that. You do realize, using your flawed logic, that there’d be a whole group of people (other late night drivers) this schmuck is causing to pull over and do the watusis just to get away from them. It’s not just me, he/she/it’d do the same thing to any one of us here in the same circumstance, because they need the warm and fuzzy of a wingman. Fuck. Them.
And again, WHY should you have to do that at all, when the solution is simply so much more elegant. Kill. Them. All. Problem solved.
In all seriousness, what they were doing was maintaining some sort of “flight bubble” around me, they’d spend five minutes on the quarter panel, then back off twenty feet for five, then like a moth to the flame, here they come again. Or they’d pass and get twenty feet ahead for two minutes, and then slow down till we were parallel. The irritating thing was really more that I was having to maintain awareness of them at all times lest they sneak into a blind spot again. That’s a bit exhausting at 78MPH (speed limit 70, so I’m not screaming down the road here) at 3AM when you’re already tired and just want to cruise. If they had simply maintained a safe distance in trail (or lead) in either lane I wouldn’t have been bothered in the least. It’s more the “what the fuck are they doing NOW?!” factor that got me bent out of shape.
I used to have a stock-type trailer for my horses, the kind that has slats half way up and you can see the horse inside.
I can’t tell you how many MORONS would drive right along beside me on the highway so their kids could see the pretty horsie. Every now and then I get one who’d actually drift a little closer so kiddoes could get a better view.
Listen, dope, I am not a mobile zoo, and should something go wrong my rig outweighs yours by a lot. It also handles very unpredictably - that 1500 lbs of live animal back there can have quite an impact on emergency evasive maneuvers. I do my damnedest to keep a clear zone around me when I trailer, so now I’m going to hit the brakes (if there’s no-one behind me) and hope you get the hell away from me. And DON’t cut me off either! Idjits.
No one said this was your “job” (but more like YOUR responsibility)…but YOU chose to remain in this situation for an hour when YOU could have obviously put YOURSELF in a safer situation a couple of minutes after YOU identified it…therefore, YOU are not driving intelligently nor safely either. Heaping 100% of the blame on the other party is a weak excuse for shirking YOUR responsibility. I believe I saw a similar scenario on my own written test that I had to pass to get a license so many years ago. But, assuming that the other guy is the ass, and he should make all of the adjustments to how he drives is a lazy assumption on YOUR part…but instead, YOU were willing to remain in a higher level of danger because of YOUR assumption. That is where the actual failed logic resides.
So, who was actually in control here? Because, it certainly wasn’t YOU.
Idiots on the road. Ugghhh indeed. But I find it funny that there were pretty much idiot drivers from day one. Or at least by 1932.
Here is a W.C. Fields film. He comes into a windfall and uses the money to hire a small army and search out and destroy “road hogs”. He even uses the words “road hogs”
So, let me get this straight. It’s my responsibility to make way for the morons of the world? We should all just stay off the highways because of the fools out there? Seriously? That’s essentially your position. And apparently you missed the part about me both slowing down and speeding up to try to create a safe distance, but that’s not enough, apparently. In fact, according to your thinking we should all alter our travel plans and driving to accomodate these cow-people.
How about they learn to drive? How about that? Is that so insane an idea?
I cannot understand your position that it’s better to suffer poor driving from others rather than that they learn to control their vehicle in a safe manner.
Do you also rail at the people who get hit by drunk drivers for daring to leave their driveway?
I wasn’t totally fond of the idea, but when I was an EMT one of my trainers said if its really foggy and you can find a tractor trailer, get behind him and stay far enough back you can just see his taillights. His rationale was, that truck is higher up, has better visibility, and multi light arrays of headlights that let him see much better than the average ford cargo van. In addition, he needs 2-3 times the distance to stop as you do. So you let him play pathfinder and if something happens, you have more time to react.
Son, just don’t. If there’s one thing I hate worse than tailgaters, it’s random people aimlessly masturbating by the side of the road. Especially at 3 am.
I don’t think anyone suggested you “just stay off the highways.” Look, the driver you describe in your OP was an idiot, a moron, a clueless jerk. I agree 100%. But I think you’re getting a little over-defensive here.
You tried unsuccessfully *for an hour *to extract yourself from this annoying situation. Don’t you think that, at some point, it might have been a reasonable decision to just cut your losses and pull off the road, for a single minute even, to get clear of this hammerhead? It would have cost you a miniscule amount of time, kept you safer, and done your blood pressure a favor to boot. If you consider that “making way for the morons of the world,” you’re as stubborn as the other guy was stupid.
To which my response to the DOT would be:
NO, HIT THE BEAST HEAD-ON AT FIFTY
TOTALLED CAR AND THE HOSPITAL, ISN’T THAT NIFTY? :smack::rolleyes:
No Burma Shave.
Agreed; there’s nothing you can do to make other people drive well; all you can do is protect yourself by getting the hell away from idiots in your vicinity.
I don’t want you to adjust, and I wish I didn’t have to either, but:
A) you have a self-interest in making that adjustment, and
B) there’s nothing else you can do.
C) by your own description, you were adjusting (varying your speed). An hour of this shit was apparently very infuriating. Given that you were demonstrably willing to make adjustments, wouldn’t you think that five minutes in a rest area or gas station would have been a much less infuriating alternative than what actually transpired?
Picture a different scenario:
a truck driver is busy sending a text message to his mistress. Due to his lack of attention to the driving task, he’s about to blow through a red light just as you’re about to enter the intersection on green. Do you stop short, or do you proceed into the intersection and let him T-bone your driver-side door just because you have the right-of-way and you’re not going to adjust for other drivers’ stupidity?
If you refuse to protect yourself from obvious danger, you are a willing victim.
Actually I was arguing the point just for fun. I take no offense at being called an idiot etc, I’ve been called far, far worse, by people I love.
I understand that defensive driving requires adaption to the foilables of other drivers, it was simply irritating to me that the moth person decided that I was the brightest light in their universe so they had to circle me insanely. At 78MPH. At 3AM. In the middle of no-damn-where North Carolina.
And make no mistake, they were simply in love with my car. Or insane. Or up to something completely weird. We’d encounter other traffic and they’d behave relatively normally, though they had a real tendency to parallel anyone they came across for at least 30 seconds to a minute, and then once we got past that traffic, it was time for another round of close formation driving.
Could I have pulled off, sure, but that doesn’t change their behavior, and the behavior is why I pitted them, after all.
One minute, ten, or an hour, it was still herd mentality driving, and I do find that very irritating. The left lane is for passing, not snuggling. :smack:
No…my position was out of self-interest in keeping myself safe from an idiot that you had described. Other posters picked up on that, but how come you didn’t?
Great idea…it’s just that they weren’t gonna improve their driving habits in one hour or less. Am I right?
Again…you weren’t teaching them to be a better driver in that one hour, but you were enabling him to remain the same shitty driver all the while endangering yourself for that whole hour…so, you tell me…are they a better driver after that hour of canoodling with you?
No, just people who tempt fate by not actively avoiding drunk drivers (by pulling off) and wishing the drunk drivers would stay off the road until they were sober (because they should know better:rolleyes:). Again, I am not excusing drunk/bad driving, but I am advocating to keeping yourself safe by not pacing back and forth with said driver for an hour…your argument does not address your own lack of personal safety…mine does.
And yes, they should learn to be better drivers, but that obvious truth was not helping you one bit for that hour…so, the better driver should be the one who recognized the dangerous situation and did something about it; like for example…REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE DANGEROUS SITUATION.
This reminds me of a time years ago when I was driving I-80 late at night and a moderate snow worsened into a blizzard somewhere around Gary, Indiana. Visibility was horrible, I could not see lane markings or where the shoulder was. The only thing that saved me was a big tractor-trailer in the right lane ahead of me. I kept his taillights in view until the next exit came up and I could get the hell off the road.
Aside from an emergency situation like that, there’s no excuse for battening onto the unfortunate driver in front of you and behaving like a demented leech.
Meh, I see nothing with staying peacefully behind another car in the slow lane, if they’re not slow enough that you feel the inclination to pass them. You shouldn’t actually tailgate, but quietly hitching yourself to them with a four-car-length tow rope is harmless. It’s trying to dance with them or climb into their gas tank that I see as problematic and unsafe.
I used to have a really fast car. When people would do this to me, I would slow down a little and let them match my speed, then floor it. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t keep up.
And my personal favorite. I try to match speeds and do the two second guideline thing with the car in front of me. Every other asshole in the world thinks that’s an open invitation to swerve their beater into that big, gaping open space, even though the road is wide open behind me.
No other annoying driving habit makes me stabbier than this one. SERIOUSLY people is getting in front of me to do the EXACT same speed really that important?
I take no offense at being called an idiot etc, I’ve been called far, far worse, by people I love.